The training courtyard was packed, a ring of torchlight throwing hard bronze shadows across the sand. Elders sat in their stone seats with faces carved from the same rock, citizens pressed shoulder to shoulder along the walls, hungry for a spectacle. On one side waited Kleon's hundred—polished shields, loud voices, swagger sharpened into jeers. On the other stood Leonidas's fifty, cloaks a deep red under the firelight, shields grounded, silent as a sealed gate. Everyone knew this was not justice. It was a dagger pointed at a peasant who had risen too far.
The night before, in a low room that smelled of oil and leather, Leonidas gathered his captains around a dirt sketch of the yard. Doros jabbed a thick finger at the pebble line that marked Kleon's front. "They'll come straight, roaring like oxen. Two to one, they'll swamp us." Kyros smirked. "Oxen spook if you jab the right spot." Theron's tone was cooler. "They're trained, not iron. Their bodies are strong, their loyalty weak. Push where faith is thin." The overlay in Leonidas's mind confirmed it: Kleon's hundred—cohesion sixty-one, loyalty fifty-nine on average. His Cohort—cohesion ninety-seven, loyalty ninety-eight and rising whenever the line breathed together. Leonidas drew a short curve across the dirt. "They believe weight wins. We'll prove iron wins. We hold the first rush, hinge them off balance, then split the middle and jaw them shut. The yard itself will eat them." Doros's grin flashed. "Crush them like grapes." Leonidas nodded. "And pour the wine where the council can drink it."
At dawn the horn called both forces into the sand. The murmurs changed timbre as the Iron Cohort marched in—no chants, no boasting, only that unnerving cadence, fifty boots finding the same earth at once. Then Kleon appeared at the head of his hundred, shoulders squared, smile sharp, men bellowing as if noise could do what discipline would not. The narrow-jawed elder raised his staff. "Prove your worth. Begin."
Kleon's men surged like a tide, bronze and shoulder and breath, a practiced rush meant to drown the smaller wall on impact. The ground trembled. A lesser line would have snapped or scattered or tried to match fury with fury. Leonidas's voice cut clean through the roar. "Shields. Hold. Breathe." The Cohort took the shock the way cliffs take waves—by flexing, not fleeing. Rims kissed, shoulders found shoulders, the shove sloshed and failed to find a seam. Doros's laugh boomed above the press. "Is this all?" Dust plumed. Spearpoints squealed against bronze and slid aside.
"Anchor left," Leonidas said, and the line obeyed in a motion that looked like instinct but was only practice hammered into bone. The Cohort hinged around its leftmost files, turning Kleon's rush into a stumble as their weight dragged itself sideways. "Press center." The wall pulsed forward, not a lunge but a tide, and suddenly there were gaps—small at first, then widening as spearheads pecked and shield rims bit ribs. Kyros's spear slipped past a guard with a cheerful hiss; Theron's point kissed a wrist and took the fight out of an entire file. The overlay pulsed in Leonidas's mind: Kleon's cohesion sliding—fifty-seven, then fifty-four—while the Cohort's ticked upward with each breath held and given back.
Kleon bellowed, shoving men forward, rage trying to do a captain's work. For a heartbeat the weight steadied. Then Leonidas saw it—the soft place where panic moved faster than orders, a little eddy where two files argued with their feet. "Split," he said, and the Cohort opened like jaws. Kleon's press carried two dozen men into the gap before they understood space had betrayed them. "Shut," Leonidas breathed, and the ring closed behind them. What had been a straight wall became a circle with teeth. Inside, the noise changed pitch from roar to choking. Spears stabbed low and quick; shield faces hammered helms and hips; men dropped to their knees and did not rise until pulled out by judges.
Around the ring, the rest of Kleon's line felt the moment someone else's panic crawled under their skin. Loyalty bars flickered downward. A veteran looked left for assurance and saw only dust. Another raised his shield a breath too high. Another took one backward step and learned how fast backward becomes running. "Press," Leonidas said, not loud, not eager; merely inevitable. The Cohort swept forward in a slow grind that sounded like a millstone turning.
Kleon's voice shredded itself trying to stitch his front together. "Stand! Stand, damn you!" But there was nothing under his words to hold them up. The hundred were strong men—no one denied that—but strength breaks when it belongs to the arm, not the line. A third of his front sagged; another third tried to wheel and found its neighbor already wheeling the other way; a last panicked clump saw the ring and mistook it for a hole. The horner at the edge hesitated, looking to the elders for a signal, then put bronze to lips and blew because the yard was no longer a trial so much as a lesson and enough bones had learned it.
Silence took two heartbeats to find the yard. Then sound returned in a rush: cheers from the walls, curses from the elders' benches, a handful of groans from men blinking at sky instead of shields. The Iron Cohort stood where it had begun, only three steps forward and one jaw closed, ranks still dressed, spears still leveled. Kleon's hundred sprawled in ragged knots—some bruised, some bleeding, some with faces that would tomorrow tell louder lies than today's truth.
The narrow-jawed elder had gone pale beneath the firelight. He opened his mouth and found no words. Damaris rose instead, staff striking once. "The trial is done. The wall stands." Kleon pushed himself up on shaking arms, pride bleeding more than his lip. "Sorcery," he spat, one last scrap of defiance for an audience already choosing a better story. Leonidas met his eyes without heat. "No. Iron."
They filed from the yard to the warm noise of a city arguing with itself. That night around their fires, the Cohort turned bread and thin wine into a feast. Doros clapped Leonidas so hard his shoulder rang. "Fifty against a hundred. Next they'll send the whole army." Kyros grinned. "Let them. The bigger the pot, the better the stew." Theron, as always, watched the edge of the firelight where shadows gathered. "You humiliated them in their own house," he said quietly. "They'll come again, sharper." The overlay flickered at the corner of Leonidas's vision—council hostility climbing like a storm up a ridge. He felt only the steady weight of shields resting within arm's reach, the low laughter of men who had breathed together and found they liked the taste of victory, the faint ring of Phokas's hammer from the forge and the soft snort of a horse stamping out the day's last jitters.
He looked at his men—Lakonians and Spartans, veterans and almost-soldiers, artisans hovering at the edges with ash on their faces and pride hiding in their mouths. He thought of Evelyne's banner burning clean and arrogant in the sky; of Rome's stone roads; of Persia's fear; of the clock over all their heads cutting time into thinner and thinner slices. He closed his fist. The lesson of the yard was not that numbers failed. It was that numbers without trust were already breaking before they touched bronze.
Steel bends. Bronze tarnishes. Iron remembers its shape.
Sparta had seen it with their own eyes. And tomorrow, when the elders plotted and Kleon nursed his wound and the city gossiped itself hoarse, the Cohort would rise, breathe, and drill, because walls do not argue. They hold.