V3Ch79-What Tybalt Would Want

Hundreds of miles south of where Tybalt and his allies consulted, drilled, and prepared, an entirely different mode of warfare unfolded itself.

“Blood and glory!” called one of the hundreds of almost-identical-seeming ogre infantrymen.

“For the horde!” yelled another.

“Kill!” shouted a third.

Then the body of them charged downhill, not bothering with a formation, coordination, or even the bare minimum of not trampling each other when one of them was slower or stumbled along the way.

The village they were attacking - forty huts or so, scattered along a river, probably loosely affiliated with each other - was almost a full mile away when they started running, so there was quite a lot of trampling. Most of the ogres were just fine, even if they got stomped on by their fellows. The regeneration of that race was incredible.

But Baldwin estimated that as many as a hundred died in the charge itself, before they even reached others who might possibly fight them.

Then they reached the huts and started ripping the little buildings apart with nothing but their fists, grabbing humans and smashing their heads in with clubs or, if the human in question was flimsy enough, tearing them in two, again with nothing more than their hands.

Fucking ridiculous, the revenant thought. Why the fuck did Tybalt even send us along? What is wrong with these ogres? It’s like we’ve let a bunch of mad dogs off a leash.

Former Beastkings Rickert and Henry -a chthonic mage and a huntsmaster respectively - stood beside Baldwin, likewise watching the carnage unfold. They just looked on with narrowed eyes, but he felt confident that they must have a similar view of this to himself. The differences between beastfolk and humans were one thing, but all had to agree that the ogres were something else. Something altogether more savage and unruly, especially now that a huge number of them were gathered together under one leader.

Baldwin had fought individual ogres before, usually with one or two men by his side per ogre. Facing a whole horde, though. That was something to test the resolve of even the bravest men.

I guess I’m glad they’re on our side.

Off to the side, Baldwin spotted Ragga walking alongside Andric, Tatiana and Sabine flying just overhead. They were making what seemed to be lighthearted conversation, though the foxman was walking with a slight limp that Baldwin mentally credited to likely night activity between himself and the Bloodlady.

How does it not turn their stomachs? he thought.

The only reason it didn’t deeply bother him to see fellow humans butchered in this way was because he was an inherently spiteful being, created by magic that used that as an asset to bind his soul to his body.

The last of the human defenders in the village below were dying at this point, but true to Tybalt’s orders, the ogres did not start feeding on their bodies. They ate the humans’ sheep - killing them and tearing into the flesh raw - and ripped out the half-grown crops to eat, swallowing them with the dirt still clinging to the skin of the turnips and carrots.

But they didn’t engage in any consumption of human flesh that Baldwin could see.

“Well, that is another village down,” said Wolflord Karel, trotting up alongside Baldwin and the Beastkings on his mount.

“That makes four today,” said another wolfman from behind him.

“I hope His Majesty will be pleased with the horde’s contribution to his war effort?” the Wolflord said.

“I think we were meant to be trying to convert some of the humans in the villages toward our cause,” said Beastking Henry in a calm, gentle tone - unexpectedly soft for a huntsmaster who stood a head taller than Baldwin.

“Well, at least none of the crops or livestock from those villages will feed Enh,” said Baldwin, shrugging helplessly. That was the main objective of this mission, after all.

“And we have not begun to dip into our own small rations,” said a wolfgirl with a long, shaggy mane of hair as she rode up alongside Baldwin. “If anything, we have increased our reserves.”

“Not them,” the revenant observed, gesturing to the ogres who were simply eating everything they saw - or killing it, or fucking it, or lighting it on fire, depending on how the mood struck them.

“There is a difference between the ogre way of war and the way of beastmen or humans,” said Karel in a careful tone of voice. “Ogres dominate terrain and pick it clean until they’re breaking open the marrow of bones and finally eating each other to survive. It is their way, if they are not stopped. Without a strong and effective leader, they cannot rise above that. Ragga is one such.”

“You talk as if you weren’t following them yourself before this,” Baldwin said.

The other wolfmen grew quiet as Karel looked the revenant firmly in the eyes.

“Fate and circumstance can leave you in unexpected company,” the Wolflord said after a moment, his words full of some veiled meaning that Baldwin felt certain he didn’t understand. It might have been a dig at him, having gone from a Kingdom soldier to a member of the undead army fighting for Tybalt, but he didn’t think so. The next words out of Karel’s mouth seemed to confirm that. “I hope you’ll tell your leader that. We’re not all like the ogres. Some of us can operate differently.”

The Wolflord rode forward, and the other wolfmen who had gathered around followed instantly behind him.

Baldwin’s eyes lingered on the wolfgirl’s rear, muscular from what he could see of it around the tail that sprouted prominently above her ass.

He shook his head. He still felt absolutely nothing.

There were some terrible things one gave up, being undead.

As Baldwin and the two Beastkings approached, the humans, wolffolk, and centaurs all moved alongside them, slipping in after the ogres, by far the largest single group in the horde, to scavenge, loot, and finish off the dying.

It was a kind of mercy that they were there, since the ogres themselves seemed to give no thought to mercy as a concept.

***

Hours later, the horde sat around hundreds of campfires eating whatever food they had taken from the latest settlement to fall victim to their savagery, a town whose wooden gates had not been strong enough to overcome ogre fists.

Baldwin sat a little to the side and continued to think about what had happened that day.

“One of them earlier pulls out this sword,” an ogre was saying across the fire from Baldwin, to the rapt attention of his fellows. The male drew the blade as he was talking, as if to demonstrate something. “He call it ‘Ogrekiller,’ say it passed down through his family.” The ogre cackled, and that set off a bunch of laughter from the other males all around him. Baldwin couldn’t see what was funny.

“More like ogre toothpick!” snorted another male.

“Oh, use it as toothpick, Mirk!” jibed another. “Funny!”

The ogre male nodded, pressed the tip of the blade into his teeth, and pushed, trying to dislodge a chunk of meat stuck there. A single loud cry echoed through the air around the campfire as he stabbed into his own gums. A tooth dropped onto the ground amid gobs of blood.

“Fuck me, you ogres are thick,” Baldwin said under his breath.

He needn’t have worried about being heard, though. Loud guffaws rang out just as he was muttering to himself. All of the other ogres had started laughing at Mirk as if his injury was a hilarious joke.

Baldwin sighed, rose, and went to go sit at another fire. The wolffolk, the centaurs, his fellow humans, or the Beastkings would make better company.

This little incident finally gave him a bit clearer of an idea of what was working through his head about the horde’s behavior so far.

They were following Tybalt’s orders to the letter. Simple orders for simple people.

But their way of following their marching orders was just destroying everything. There was probably a far better way to go about their appointed task.

Baldwin wondered if this was something the necromancer would want reported to him. The merciless path the ogres were taking was counter to his own usual ethos as a conqueror. It was a disagreement that Baldwin and Tybalt had discussed in the first few days of the revenant’s life as an undead.

Mercy is anathema to success in warfare. That had been Baldwin’s advice back then.

But the necromancer had made his own stance fairly clear. Then he had lived by it. In his conquest of the Salt Waste, Tybalt had taken care to spare civilian populations as much as he could, even as he burned their homes and forced them to leave.

Now the ogre horde was riding around, embodying Baldwin’s advice. As compared with Tybalt’s selective, careful approach, the ogres descended like a plague of locusts, destroying everything.

On the one hand, it isn’t what he would do. On the other hand…

At the rate they were riding southwest, they would probably be able to complete a full loop around the capital by the time Tybalt brought his other forces down to besiege the city.

If we do that, and they hit every area on the way like this, Enh will start to go hungry by the time Tybalt attacks, Baldwin guessed.

It would also fill the countryside with fear. That could be a good thing, if it made them too afraid to even fight back when Tybalt’s army showed up to take command over more of the country. Or it might make normal people less likely to surrender without a fight in the future, if they assumed that every place these barbaric northern invaders visited would just be destroyed.

There was also the possibility that Ragga and her barbarians would draw more of the Nietian military out and get destroyed before they could even link up with Tybalt, but this more destructive approach probably made that less likely than leaving survivors would.

Baldwin spotted the Beastkings sitting near Ragga, Andric, Tatiana, and Sabine. There was a space for him at that fire.

One of them will tell him, if it’s something that he would want to know, Baldwin told himself. This isn’t an objectively bad approach. Maybe it is what Tybalt would have wanted. He didn’t emphasize mercy or something, despite knowing what ogres are like. And if we all independently decide to keep quiet about it, maybe that’s because what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.