Kai dropped his hand.
Four hundred and twelve arrows crossed the morning sky.
He'd read descriptions of massed archery before — every serious military historian had. The accounts were consistent across cultures and centuries. The sound was always described the same way. A hiss. A whisper. Something that didn't match the scale of what it was.
The reality was louder.
It was the sound of four hundred and twelve individual impacts arriving in a corridor forty metres long and four men wide within the space of two seconds, and the human response to that was not something any book had prepared him for. The noise that came back across the river was immediate and total and Kai made himself keep watching because looking away was a luxury commanders didn't get.
This is what it costs, he thought. Remember that.
The vanguard didn't break. That was the first thing he noted — Harken's men were disciplined, shields coming up fast, the front ranks locking together with the practiced motion of soldiers who'd been through this before. Maybe a third of the volley found gaps. The rest clattered off shields and helms and the timber of the barricade.
But a third of four hundred and twelve was not nothing.
"Second volley," Kai said.
Brennan was already moving.
Three days ago Kai had sat down with Calt, the northern village headman, and had a second conversation that he hadn't mentioned to Aldric.
The first conversation had been about grain and labour. The second had been about bows.
Every farming village in a border province kept bows. Not military bows — hunting bows, shorter draw, less range, less penetration against armour. But Kai hadn't needed penetration against armour. He'd needed volume at close range into a packed corridor, and hunting bows at thirty metres into unarmoured backs and exposed legs were more than sufficient for that.
Calt had produced forty one men who could shoot. Kai had spent two days positioning them on the elevated ridge above the western bank with very simple instructions: wait for the signal, aim low, and keep cycling until Brennan tells you to stop.
He hadn't told Harken's scouts about them because Harken's scouts had been looking at the bridge structure, not at the tree line sixty metres back.
That was the thing about people who measured strength in mana grades — they looked for mages. They looked for knights. They didn't look for farmers with hunting bows standing very quietly in the shadows of an oak ridge.
Always account for what the enemy isn't looking for, Kai thought. That's where the leverage is.
The second volley hit before the first had fully settled.
Kai had drilled the timing with Brennan for two days — the sequence between volleys, the targeting rotation, the specific instruction to aim for the bridge itself on the third volley rather than the men. Not to kill. To slow. To make every man still on the bridge look down at arrows skittering off stone around his feet and make a decision about whether forward or back was the better option.
Most chose forward. That was what he'd predicted and what he'd wanted — men pressing from behind, the column bunching, the bridge approach corridor filling to capacity while the archers cycled through their supply with the careful rationing of soldiers who knew the count was finite.
The vanguard commander — the big man on the grey horse who'd led the crossing — had gotten across before the collapse and was now doing exactly what a good commander would do: organising his stranded two hundred into a defensive formation and assessing the blockage with professional speed.
Kai watched him through the overlay.
┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
│ BATTLEFIELD OVERLAY: ACTIVE │
│ │
│ Western bank: 220 enemy infantry │
│ Eastern bank: 260 enemy infantry │
│ Bridge: BLOCKED (collapse active) │
│ Enemy mages: 2 on western bank │
│ Enemy cavalry: STATIONARY (east) │
│ Ford status: IMPASSABLE │
│ Our casualties: 0 │
└──────────────────────────────────────┘
Two mages on the western bank. That's the problem.
He'd known mages would get across — you couldn't stop everything — but two was worse than one. The overlay tagged them both with estimated mana grades. One B-rank. One C-rank. Enough between them to work on the outer layers of Oswin's collapse structure if they organised properly.
"Brennan." Kai didn't take his eyes off the mages. "The two men in grey on the left flank of their formation."
Brennan looked. "Mages."
"Prioritise them. Not to kill. Harass. Keep them moving, keep them ducking, don't let them stand still long enough to concentrate."
Brennan looked at him sideways. "That's a specific instruction."
"They need stillness to cast at full power. Take the stillness away."
A beat.
"Huh," Brennan said, and went to relay it.
It was the right call.
The B-rank mage was good — Kai could see it in the economy of his movements, the way he assessed the structure before committing mana rather than blasting at it blindly. Given thirty seconds of stillness he could have found the load-bearing points and worked on them methodically.
He didn't get thirty seconds.
Every time he set his stance an arrow clattered into the ground two feet from him, or off his shield, or into the man beside him, and he had to move. Not enough to hurt him. Enough to reset his concentration. Enough to turn a methodical demolition job into a frustrated, inefficient one.
The C-rank mage lasted less time before giving up entirely and turning to shield work instead.
By the time the B-rank had burned through enough mana to clear the first two outer layers his hands were shaking and the sun had moved two hours across the sky.
The third layer held.
The vanguard commander tried three other approaches.
Kai watched all of them with the detached attention of a man grading an exam.
The first was a flanking attempt along the riverbank — eight men moving single file along the water's edge trying to get around the edge of the collapse structure. Oswin had anticipated this. The structure's southern edge extended six feet into the shallows. The eight men got their boots wet and turned back.
Good design, Oswin.
The second was a direct assault on the structure itself — twenty men with axes and sheer determination, shields locked overhead against the arrows, chopping through timber fast enough to matter. They made progress. Oswin had used good hardwood for the outer face specifically because Kai had asked what would slow axes down.
It took the twenty axemen forty minutes to clear what the B-rank mage had cleared in ten. By which point they were exhausted, three were down from arrow hits that had found gaps in the shield wall, and the third layer was still there.
Fatigue. Add that to the report. Hardwood against axes is a force multiplier in extended engagements.
The third approach was the one that made him pay attention.
The vanguard commander pulled his remaining men back from the structure entirely, formed them into a tight defensive block in the middle of the western bank, and stopped attacking. Just held position. Shields up. Conserving energy.
He's waiting for relief from the eastern bank.
Kai had expected this. Harken on the eastern bank had two options — find another crossing or clear the bridge blockage from the eastern side. The ford was gone. That left the blockage.
The problem was that the collapse had been designed to be significantly harder to clear from the eastern side. The interlocking mechanism had fallen in a specific orientation — manageable from the west with the right tools and time, considerably less manageable from the east without equipment nobody in this world had thought to bring because nobody in this world had ever built a collapsible bridgehead before.
That's the advantage of being the only person in the room who's read certain books.
The withdrawal came at midday.
Not a rout — Harken was too good for that. A controlled professional pullback, the eastern bank infantry reforming into column with the discipline of men who'd been beaten tactically but not broken. The vanguard commander held his defensive block until the eastern side had fully withdrawn, then moved his own men back across the cleared bridge in good order, maintaining formation the whole way.
Kai watched until the last man crossed and the column disappeared over the eastern ridge.
The valley went quiet except for the river.
He stood on the ridge and looked at the bridge — the collapsed structure, the arrow scattered approach, the water moving brown and indifferent underneath — and thought about the vanguard commander who'd handled an impossible situation about as well as anyone could have.
I'd hire that man, he thought. If he's ever available.
Then the system chimed.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ✦ QUEST COMPLETE │
│ Prepare Ashfield's Defence │
│ │
│ REWARDS │
│ +20 Command │
│ Skill Unlocked — FORMATION Lv.1 │
│ [Active: Apply historical formation │
│ bonuses to commanded units] │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────┘
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ✦ BONUS OBJECTIVE COMPLETE │
│ Win without losing a single man │
│ │
│ BONUS REWARD UNLOCKED │
│ Skill — SPOILS OF WAR Lv.1 │
│ [Passive: Gain 0.1% of defeated enemy │
│ unit stats per engagement victory. │
│ Scales with army size and enemy quality.] │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Kai read the skill description twice.
Zero point one percent.
He ran the proc.
┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
│ SPOILS OF WAR — PROC │
│ Engagement: Bridge of Ashfield │
│ Enemy units defeated: 220 │
│ Average enemy Combat stat: 8 │
│ │
│ Combat gained: +0.004 │
└──────────────────────────────────────┘
He stared at that number for a long time.
Zero. Point. Zero. Zero. Four.
He did the math automatically. To get Combat to ten — a number that might actually be useful in a real confrontation — at zero point zero zero four per engagement of this size, he would need approximately two thousand five hundred equivalent victories.
Alternatively he needed much larger armies defeating much larger enemies.
Scale, he thought. It's always about scale.
"My lord."
Aldric was standing beside him. The old knight's face carried the particular expression of a man who had just watched something he was going to be processing for a long time. Something in it had shifted from six days ago — not quite respect, something more careful than that. The look of a man who'd revised a fundamental assumption and wasn't yet comfortable with the revision.
"Are you alright?" Aldric said.
"Yes." Kai dismissed the notification. "Fine."
"You've been standing completely still for about two minutes."
"I was doing maths."
A pause. "Encouraging maths?"
Kai thought about the skill. About the scaling. About ten years from now standing at the head of an army that would make Harken's five hundred look like a skirmish, and what zero point one percent of that would compound into over time.
"Yes," he said. "Eventually."
Aldric looked at him a moment longer then turned to the valley.
"No casualties," the old knight said quietly.
"No."
"Forty three men." A pause. "Against five hundred."
"The numbers were never the point."
Aldric was silent. The river moved below them. Behind them Kai could hear Brennan's voice organising the men — calm, practical, the voice of someone who had also revised a fundamental assumption and decided to get on with things.
"Where did you study," Aldric said. The same question Brennan had asked. The same careful tone, as if they'd compared notes.
Kai glanced at him.
The old knight was looking at the bridge, not at him. Waiting.
"Somewhere with very good libraries," Kai said.
Aldric nodded slowly. As if that was the answer he'd expected and it still didn't fully satisfy him.
"What happens now?" he said.
Kai looked east toward the ridge where Harken's column had disappeared. The lord would regroup. Reassess. He was good enough to know he'd been beaten by something he didn't understand, which meant he'd spend time trying to understand it before moving again. That bought time. Not much. But some.
And time, in Kai's experience, was just logistics with a deadline.
"Now," Kai said, "we rebuild the wall."
┌─────────────────────────┐
│ CURRENT STATS │
│ Command ██████ 35 │
│ Tactics ████░░ 18 │
│ Logistics ███░░░ 14 │
│ Intel ████░░ 17 │
│ Presence ███░░░ 12 │
│ Combat █░░░░░ 1.004│
└─────────────────────────┘