Hawooo! Hawoooo! Hawoooo!
The men in the main group of the barbarians, they flinched at this sound, the worse when only one man of the ten who had gone in came out of the trees, bleeding from the arm and missing his spear.
The barbarian chief snarled at the fleeing warrior. Insult towards the bravery of the person. And then the leader shouted and pointed, and at his order, everyone started jogging towards where our ambush had been.
Immediately I ordered all of my elves at the ambush to flee into the woods, to avoid being caught by the main group.
Many groups of elves were hidden in the trees along this line, with orders to launch their javelins at a far range, and immediately duck back behind the trees to be safe. I’d decided last night that I did not want to risk trying to actually get close to the barbarians, who due to their larger size and muscles could throw their javelins much further than my soldiers could.
But the spears these ambushers threw would do some harm and would teach my enemies that chasing my men was something you must do cautiously.
The blessing on all of the elves who sat in ambush meant that while there was not a great deal of force behind the throws, they often hit and caused wounds. One lucky strike went through an eye and killed one of the barbarians. Also they dodged all of the javelins that were thrown at them in return as they ran away.
And while the small group of barbarians who had come up first were faster than my people had been, except for the ones who tripped, this time, in the face of the endless howling from my men, and the pile of bodies they found, the fleet-footed barbarians did not want to leave the security of their own company.
This running battle continued for five minutes, until they’d run past all of the prepared positions for ambushes I’d set up, and the elves had fled back into their prepared groups.
The barbarians had no idea where my elves were, as they all had disappeared into thick endless forest. The barbarian force then stopped moving and settled down to argue amongst themselves.
I had a vague hope that now that we’d bled them substantially they’d just decide to turn around and go home.
Arnhelm snuck close to the band so I could hear the system’s translation of the arguments. He had lots of branches and leaves poked into the deer hide wrap he wore. He crawled towards them on his knees, staying behind fallen tree trunks to remain hidden. He somehow picked perfectly each handfall or placement of his knees, making not a single sound that I could hear.
He got close enough to their army for me to hear the shouted argument between the man we’d captured last year, the barbarian chief, the man who’d escaped our ambush and two other barbarians who I knew to be among their leaders.
This argument was loud, vicious, full of harsh snarls, angry gestures, and the shouting ended when the barbarian chief casually stabbed his oversized axe into the chest of the man who’d fled from our ambush.
One more enemy dead.
No losses, and I’d already whittled them down by about 10%.
I knew though, the rest of the day would be harder.
I opened Marcus’s status sheet. He still strongly disapproved of me, but he was a little less disapproving. However I knew that would not change his brutal murderousness, and while it didn’t matter for how hard he fought, his personal morale was high. He had fun killing that group.
We were on the right track.
I was fairly satisfied by my use of spiritual energy. I’d kept sixty elves boosted for the twenty minutes of the fight, along with Marcus, and I’d used almost seven thousand units of spiritual energy, but I started with almost three hundred thousand, and I was fairly sure I could freely and liberally use spiritual power during the main battle.
Between this and the fight the previous night, I’d used almost 3% of my spiritual energy stores and I’d killed 10% of the enemy without taking any losses.
That mountain temple was the fundamental key to my margin of safety in this battle. Without the additional storage of spiritual energy allowed by it, there was very little chance that I would have been able to keep a blessing on everyone during the next part of the battle.
The barbarians started off through the thick forest again, marching through the trees. They moved at a slower pace than before, with sharp-eyed men staring deep into the woods, ready to hurl their javelins at any sign of one of us.
Several times they nervously threw a spear at a rabbit, or a big insect, or once an unfortunate deer fleeing from the noise made by a group of my soldiers.
The barbarians laughed when they killed the deer, thinking it was a good omen, and they quickly tied up the legs of the dead animal, and one of their younger men carried it along with him, as the barbarians were also hunter gatherers who were not willing to just leave behind such a juicy and big animal.
Arnhelm’s excessive bravery at last got him injured as he snuck along behind them. Some movement he made let him be seen, and three twitchy javelin throwers hurled their spears at him, probably not being yet sure that there was anyone there.
He alertly dodged the first two javelins. The third spear thrown by the barbarian chieftain arced right to where Arnhelm dodged, and in that last instant after being missed by the first two javelins, he hurled himself to the side, but that spear cut through the thick deer’s hide he wore like it was a coat of leaves, and left a deep furrow along his side.
He immediately ran from the barbarian band, and by the time another round of javelins was readied to throw at him he was out of range. He left a spotty trail of blood. But the barbarian leader decided to not wildly chase a single man, out of fear of more ambushes. So they let Arnhelm escape.
The caution they showed was fortunate since I did not have any ambush in place to rescue Arnhelm if they had run to chase him down.
Whew.
Part of me still wished they had stupidly chased him.
The barbarians had been decimated by my first ambush, but the way their band moved since then showed they had reacted intelligently and capably to the situation. I could not attack them again in the same way without taking losses.
At least if all was lost and we had to flee from combat after our defeat, they would not do a very good job of chasing us down out of reasonable fear.
Hours ticked by as the barbarian band marched, unopposed, closer and closer to the prepared and trapped positions around my settlement home.
The ambushing group had quickly run back to home, so that they would be in position to fight in the main battle long before the barbarians arrived. Those hundred elves had high morale, and a little bit of battle testing now.
Marcus was cheered when he arrived amongst a force of several hundred elves. They excitedly started talking to their friends as they rested from the fast jog through the forest, and they told the tale of our ambush and victory.
And I could see a relief amongst my dispirited people as they now knew clearly that Marcus still stood with us, even if he was not leading the battle.
As we waited dozens of the elves who were good climbers went high into the trees to be ready to toss down the stones we’d carried up into these trees over the past days. I wished it was the highest point of summer, when the thick green foliage would have camouflaged my men even better.
The climbers in the trees smeared all of their exposed skin and the deer hides they wore with mud that had been mixed so that after it dried it had roughly the same hue as the brown bark of the trees around us.
Many of the climbers took off the deer hides as the signal that our enemies were close came and just wore the mud, despite the chilly late autumn air, since the weight of the heavy jackets could make the difference between a thinner branch being able to hold their weight, or breaking under them.
A large force of several hundred elves was placed under the direct command of Martialus. This group formed a line in the trees that was visible and was supposed to be visible.
The barbarians would hopefully charge these elves, to get into range to first throw jav
elins, and then to attack them directly. And in so doing they would run under trees with elves sitting high and disguised in the treetops who would throw stones on them.
Instead, the barbarian chieftain stopped his band from moving for a minute when they first sighted the elves with their spears standing arm to arm in a line three men thick.
The flickering afternoon light beamed down through the bare tree branches onto my elves and onto the barbarian warriors alike. A gust of a chill breeze went through the woods, but then fortunately the wind calmed.
And then, instead of charging, the barbarian force started to march around this army, going a long way around to circle towards where they would reach the clearing with the settlement on the other side of the army.
I ordered Martialus to have his army follow the barbarians at a great distance, but while the morale of the elves under his command had been sufficient to get them into this line, they refused to follow the barbarians at all, no matter how much Martialus, allowing his position to go to his head, slapped and threatened them. The morale of these elves steadily went down.
I had kept the group of a hundred elves who had successfully ambushed the army deeper in the forest. They were led by Arnhelm and Marcus was with them, and they had high morale, though they were more tired than most of the elves from having marched all of the way back.
Arnhelm’s status screen said that he was fully ready to fight, and that his wound in his side had been stitched together. According to the status screen, his wound was not bothering him at all, even though blood still seeped slowly into the big bandage his friends had tightly wrapped around his side.
This unit, with Marcus in the front leading them, were ordered through the thick trees to block the direction the barbarians were going. Every direction the barbarians went, when they got close enough to the settlement there would be lots of prepared trees with stones high in them, but I wanted to get them into an area where there were dozens of them before I unleashed the first trap.
After ten tense minutes where I kept a mid-strength spiritual blessing that doubled the mental effectiveness of my elves on the entire army, the group led by Marcus got in front of the barbarians, and they moved to line up in the thick trees. But while the force was still in a ragged broken line, the barbarian chieftain saw Marcus standing next to a tree, with his long spear gripped in the middle as he gestured and shouted orders for the elves to line up more neatly, and to ready themselves.
As soon as the barbarian chieftain saw Marcus, his eyes widened, and his jaw dropped, with something like surprise and anger at seeing another human amongst his enemies, and a human who was almost a giant.
Several of his men went pale as they pointed at Marcus, and the way he casually held the spear, wavering from side to side, in a deadly flickering circle.
And then with a snarled shout the barbarian chieftain, a tall man over six feet tall, with flowing blond hair, and rich brown furs covering his body, charged forward, brandishing his thick spear. He gestured as he did for everyone to follow him, and made an over-the-shoulder throwing gesture that I’d by now seen meant that the men were supposed to use their javelins.
This force was too much for these elves to face, so I ordered everyone to flee.
Marcus stayed in position for half a minute longer, knocking the javelins thrown at him from the air with his spear, or stepping aside to contemptuously let them fall to the ground, and then he ran too, back towards the elven army.
There was no prepared trap behind these elves, as I had them flee away from the village. I was hoping that I’d read the mind of the barbarian chieftain rightly, and that by now he would automatically expect an ambush if he chased our force.
And I had.
After just a minute, he ordered his men to pull up and stop following us, with loud crying shouts. The translation I got was, Unable to catch the big one. Besides, village in opposite direction. Obvious trap. Village in big clearing, burn it and loot safely!
One of my elves had been hit by the flying javelins sent after them, and the blade had ripped apart the man’s arm, half severing the bone right above the elbow.
The elf screamed in pain. Marcus knocked him over the head, an almost soft and kind blow that knocked him unconscious. The warrior quickly and efficiently in about thirty seconds tied an extremely tight tourniquet around the wound. And then Marcus used his axe to neatly finish the amputation the spear had started.
I had not been able to watch that.
Then he ordered two of the elves who were friends of the maimed man to take him around to one of the retreat spots where there were a few elves who had some knowledge of medicine.
The barbarian chieftain chose to march directly towards the village, after the direction was pointed out to him by their guide.
That was what I had hoped would happen.
There were three hundred men between him and the village in that direction, and dozens of elves high up in the trees above them, disguised and waiting to toss stones down. The ground he would walk through was densely filled with hidden blades along the ground, and the hidden spears that Martialus had developed parallel to the ground.
Marcus and Arnhelm had rallied their force, and they now marched back in the direction they had run to come up behind the barbarians. Most of them carried their throwing javelins, rather than the longer fighting spears. When the barbarians were startled by the stones hurled down on their heads, I wanted to add javelins flying into their backs.
The barbarian force marched under the first of the elves in the trees. They did not see them, as they did not look up as they were desperately trying to see any elven ambushes on the ground. There were elvish armies now loosely surrounding the smaller force of barbarians. In any direction they went there would be bands of my men.
Of course each group of elves would flee and yield, rather than trying to directly fight if the whole barbarian force went to run through them.
I used my spiritual energy like a radio to arrange all of the groups to come in and take their positions.
The elves in the trees kept waiting. And waiting. More and more of the line of barbarians snuck under their trees.
They did not move, out of fear of being seen.
And then when most of the loosely structured column of barbarians was under these trees, as one group, synchronized by my spiritual power, the twenty elves who were in position lifted stones twice the size of a fist, and hurled them at the heads of the men below.
Many of the rocks missed, of course.
But more than enough of the heavy rocks struck their targets, crushing skulls and shoulders and vertebrae.
Only a dozen of the barbarian warriors were killed or knocked out by the first round, and when the second set of stones was thrown down, only a half dozen more, as this time they were dodging and blocking with their spears and axes.
As the third and fourth volley of rocks were hurled down, all of the elves who had surrounded the barbarians begin to scream out the keening war cry they had practiced for the past two days.
Hawooo! Hawwoooo! Hawoooo!
This was an order they all were in good enough spirits to follow, and as all the elves heard the forests filled with the sounds of their comrades, they knew this was their land, and this knowing filled them with the need to win and protect themselves and all they loved. Spirits soared, and the morale of all increased, with determination to bloody our enemies, and to destroy them to the death.
Arnhelm and Marcus led their unit to charge the rear of the barbarians, and they hurled the javelins into their backs. The distracted barbarians only threw a few back at first, but one of those thrown spears went through the throat of a young woman of 270 years named Lily.
She would not be the last to die this day.
More than a dozen of the barbarians were spitted by these javelin throws, and by now I’d killed more than a quarter of their army.
I hoped they would crack and flee in some direction, or even better, all directions at
once.
The barbarians on the ground could do very little to the elves hurling the stones down from directly above. Some of them had the skill to climb trees, but it would be extremely dangerous to try climbing with an elf directly above dropping stones on his head. Each elf was at least forty feet high in the trees, and it was extremely awkward to throw a javelin straight up. There were a few tries, but most did not get that high with enough force to do any damage, and for the few that did, the elves in the trees used my blessing to see the danger, and move their feet or bodies so that they were shielded by thick tree branches.
The barbarian chief screamed at everyone to run once more towards the settlement. I saw that he now realized that the forest was a trap for his people and that if he wanted to survive and turn the tables on us, he needed to get into the open ground, where the longer legs of the tall human barbarians would let them easily catch us, and where they would be able to see any army waiting for them.
Also the barbarians would be able to loot our belongings, such as they were, if they got close. I didn’t think that would do them very much good.
The barbarians’ morale was wavering though, and while most of the barbarian army immediately followed his order and ran in the direction he pointed, a few others randomly ran towards the areas between my armies where there was no sound of the creepy ululating war cry.
About half of those dozen runners escaped the battle of this day and successfully fled my forest, taking tales of their defeat with them. The others though were hunted and killed.
Most of the barbarians jogged out from under the band of trees with lots of elves in position to throw stones at them. And they jogged right into the blade traps that covered all of the forest pathways into my town.
The climbers in the trees clambered along behind the barbarian band. Even though my tree climbing elves were fast at jumping or swinging with prepared ropes from tree to tree, the barbarians jogging on the firm ground of the forest floor were much faster.
Civilization- Barbarians Page 15