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-VB-

We made enough mirrors using silver and glass for the first semaphore and also a shit ton of nails for the watchtowers the mirrors would be housed in. As spring washed away to summer, I sent those two out, each with thin paperback instructions on how to use light as a communication system.

I personally went out to deliver one such set of mirror and nails to town farthest from the center of our compact and was closest to the frontlines of the regional madness.

When I arrived at Maienfeld, the chief of the town greeted me warmly, especially when he saw the crate of nails and the small box that held the mirror.

"Welcome back to our humble town, Mr. Hans!" the thin man with a bushy beard greeted me heartily. "Come, come! Let us break salt and bread. A friend of the town should get the best of the best, especially when he comes bearing gifts, no?"

"Thank you for your hospitality," I smiled as the shorter man wrapped an arm around my back and shoulder with some difficulty, and gave me a solid pat on the back. I let him lead me into the town, and I got my second good look at the town.

Maienfeld was small; it was closer to a village than a town. Some four hundred people lived together here, which was significant for a Swabian Alp town. It was as big as Travaos, which I always kept referring to as a village.

I stopped myself before I got lost in my thoughts over semantics.

"I hope nothing\'s gone wrong while we have been gone?" I asked him while wordlessly greeting the townsfolk who recognized me.

"No, nothing, but I am glad you are here because the Baron of Brandis has been calling."

"Is he not your liege lord?" I asked with a raised eyebrow.

"He is, he is," the thin chief replied. "But he has been calling for more men and tax than he promised to take."

It\'s always that, wasn\'t it?

"If it pleases you, then I will stay here to talk with the heralds."

He grabbed my hands. "Thank you, Sir Hans!" he cheered and I couldn\'t help but wonder if I just signed myself up to stay for several months.

At the very least, the valley here was wider, warmer, and livelier than Travaos.

I sent back three of the ten men who came to help me with the delivery. The rest remained with me.

-VB-

It happened on a clear day and on the flat valley ground.

We were only at Maienfeld for a week when a knight of the baron came riding in on a warehouse and a dozen men-at-arms. I spotted them first; I liked to keep an eye out as always, because I had the highest chance of survival should an altercation happen. The knight rode while the rest walked on the road towards Maienfeld.

The knight had a plate helmet, but his chest plate was just that; there was no full plate abdomen guard except for his brigandine. No shoulder, arm, or thigh guards, either. He had forearm and sheen guards, but they looked brittle and ill-maintained.

Was this guy even a proper knight? He could be a hedge knight who just swore allegiance or something.

He spotted me and my big ass sword rather quickly because I was waiting by the entrance of the village.

"Who are you?!" he demanded.

"I am Hans of Fluela! Who are you?!" I demanded in return.

"Hans of Fluela? You are the rumored noble killer!" he snarled as he drew his sword.

I blinked. Wait, was this guy serious? Drawing the sword right off of the bat? Also, I was known and rumored? Should I be flattered or alarmed?

"I don\'t think you want to do that," I warned him while reaching for my sword hanging from my back.

"Shut up, peasant! It is a crime for you to continue to exist when you have broken so many laws and slain so many knights and nobles! Surrender yourself and I will be merciful and deliver a quick death!"

Okay, this man woke up today and chose violence.

He kicked his horse into action, and it screamed as it charged forward.

I took out my sword and waited for him to get in close.

And then when he yelled as he brought his sword down in a decapitating strike as he was passing by, I stabbed my much longer sword forward and let him slam into it.

Moving too quickly as he was, he got less than a second before he slammed into the tip of my sword, chest plate first.

I let gravity do the work and watched as the impaled knight and my sword fell, and the impact of the fall was enough for my sword to cut down his mostly unprotected abdomen. I winced as the guts sloshed around the wound and the blade, but the now bigger wound made it easier for me to pull my blade out. The knight, barely alive at this point and profusing bleeding, keeled over and remained still.

I pulled up my longsword and firmly planted its tip into ground. I then looked at the dozen men now looking at me. Except for a few, their faces set on firmly. They had made their decision.

"Was he a recently sworn in knight on something?" I asked them as they started to spread out.

My own soldiers, who had just watched it from afar, quickly came up to my side and spread out, shields up and weapons pointed towards the enemies just like how I taught them.

"Something like that," one of them replied. "He was still a knight of the Baron of Brandis, though," the same man-at-arms said as he raised his spear.

"Is it really necessary for us to fight? If he heard of me, then surely, you\'ve heard of me and what I\'ve done," I replied as I pulled my sword back out of the ground.

"Maienfeld\'s villagers are traitors anyways," the same men-at-arms spat. "Instead of fighting for their rightful liege lord, they went behind his back and sought the help of their peasant friends! Kill them!"

"You should have brought more soldiers if you wanted to do something like this!" I roared back as I jumped forward and activated [Intimidation]. Like a wave, the confident men-at-arms suddenly paled and staggered backward while my men, unaffected by [Intimidation] as they weren\'t the targets, surged forward.

It took them two seconds to get themselves back together, but by then, I\'d crossed the distance between them and had swung my first strike.

My thick and heavy blade tore through one man\'s neck, another man\'s brigandine-armored torso, and the third man\'s hip from high to low in that one strike. Just like that, their force was down from twelve to nine.

Pulling out throwing knives out from under my bear fur cloak, I threw them one at a time but as quickly as I could while I used my other hand to lift my sword back up. I threw three (which was all I had) by the time I had my sword back up, and saw two of the knives find their targets, but only one managed to score a kill.

Four down, eight to go.

That\'s when my soldiers crashed into the shocked and unnerved Brandis men-at-arms.

Men screamed as speartips and blades slashed and stabbed.

By the end of the brief skirmish that took only a minute from the first blood to the surrender of the last two men-at-arms, eleven people laid dead, ten of theirs and one of mine.

I grimaced, looking at the man who\'d died fighting with us. He didn\'t need to, but war caused tragedies like this.

"Strip the bodies of everything valuable except for Dean\'s. We\'ll… we\'ll wrap him up and send him back home. Traoan, go and tell the chief that the baron\'s men attacked us first. This is a clear sign of aggression, one we need to answer together. Call up the other villages."

War had come again to our doorstep.

-VB-

Chapter 24

-VB-

Attacking the men of the Baron of Bardis was an attack upon the Count of Toggenburg, the baron\'s direct liege.

I didn\'t realize it at the time, but that\'s what my actions meant, even if it was in the defense of my personhood, safety, and neighbor. This was especially so because I was technically one of the signers of the "Compact of the Seven." By attacking me with a knight, whether or not the attack had been ordered, when I was one of the leaders of the Compact, the Count of Toggenburg more or less declared war on us.

This declaration was not lost on five of the eight leaders, including myself, of the Compact. When the incident happened, I sent out a call for those who were able to come to travel to Maienfeld so that we could discuss this without any one of us taking unwanted unilateral action.

Did it make any kind of offensive or even defensive action against the count hard? Fuck yes! However, I now had responsibilities, and unless these people gave me that privilege in the first place, I couldn\'t do that.

It was only thanks to the fledgling and barely comprehensible semaphore system that we were able to gather faster than the count could muster his levies, and despite this, three of us couldn\'t make it due to circumstances they themselves were facing and of the five who came, three were not the chiefs, or mayors, or whatever, but representative of the village or town.

Including Travaos. Instead of Kraft, they sent Arnold who should have been still learning how to properly lead the men and women at the Fluela Fort, not making life-changing decisions right at the edge of the border!

"They want to crush us," I grumbled at a table where those six leaders sat.

"They were going to burn my village to do it," the village chief of Maienfeld, the reedy man who greeted me warmly when I arrived not too long ago, spoke with gritted teeth. I saw the rage in his eyes. Fear, yes, but the rage was bigger. He was using it to not fall into a pit of fear.

If I was being honest, then he had a good reason to be a shivering fetus-ball of fear.

A count was declaring war.

For reference, the total population of the Compact of the Seven was roughly nine thousand people, and this wasn\'t the size of the militia, which was at most five hundred.

Yeah, me and Travaos fighting back against the Count of Zernez was a desperation thing. The Count of Zernez had a similarly sized population as all of the Compact of the Seven, but he was in charge of administering a small town and its immediate surrounding area with a total population of four thousand, which was less than the Compact\'s.

The Count of Toggenburg, on the other hand, was one of the powerhouses of the region. According to the merchants, peddlers, and Deacon Benjamin, there were four powers in our region: Toggenburgs, Werdenberg, Chur, and Sargans.

Oh, and we sat in the middle of them.

Had I actually made our situation worse by forming this small alliance? It wasn\'t even a political alliance, just a defensive pact.

The lords didn\'t care, apparently.

"We\'ll have to fight like we did against Zernez, wouldn\'t we?" Arnold asked me. His tone sunk too low to be optimistic. "But we have none of the advantages we\'ve had at Fluela. No thick walls, no preparation beyond what we have now, no meager amount of iron to turn to weapons, no -"

"But we attack," I cut him off with the best solution I had. "If we cannot defend our homes because our homes are too weak," I gulped. "Then we take the fight to them. We make them bleed for their lord until our very visage becomes too gruesome and fearful for them to stand their ground. Then we force the count to … white peace. Or something."

Because the Count of Toggenburg was not like the Count of Zernez. The County of Zernez was nothing but a barony with an inherited count title. The County of Toggenburg was a proper county with the military means to back it up. Let\'s say, like a thousand levies and five hundred men-at-arms at minimum.

On the other hand, our defensive pact had a maximum of one thousand and five-hundred volunteers. This was the total amount of volunteers we agreed upon when we first signed that contract and was, of course, under the assumption that they would be willing to provide.

It was all too common for people to sign up on a deal and then back out when disaster struck.

I … I didn\'t know what to expect from them.

"We fight."

I looked up in surprise. The oldest among us had spoken. Even more surprising, it was the village chief of St. Peters.

"We fight," he spoke again despite the tremble common in the elderly coloring his voice. He stood up with purpose at the table that five of us had gathered. "Those greedy lords are here to kill us now that we are ready to stand up on our own two feet! They\'re already fighting over the bishop\'s scraps! What will they do when they get to us? We all heard about what happened to Albula, Lantsch, and Vaz! I\'m not going to sit by and watch it happen to us!"

I continued to stare in surprise.

I… thought they were going to back off from how fearful they looked.

"We\'ll tell them to fuck off!" Maienfeld chief agreed wholeheartedly as he shot up from his seat.

I let myself relax.

The worst hadn\'t come to pass.

Thank God.

"Then let\'s get our men out here," I declared with a grin. "We got lordling ass to kick."

-VB-

Chapter 25

-VB-

Mobilization … was slow.

With mountains between two of our seven members and a long, winded valley barely connecting the rest, we were not exactly a centralized nor prepared group.

However, enthusiasm made up for a lot of it.

Within a week, we had eight hundred fighters ready to go and kick noble ass!

Unfortunately, most of them possessed little to no experience when it came to fighting. It was basically up to me to train them.

"And thrust!"

"HA!"

"And pull!"

"HA!"

"Swipe!"

"HA!"

"Stab!"

"HA!"

And so I trained them.

I walked up to one of the volunteers, a graying bearded man with pock marks from small pox and pimples from his childhood and adolescent respectively, and gently pushed and pulled his arms until he had the proper stance.

"Like that."

"Yes, sir," he replied with a gruff grunt. It was just how David talked.

I nodded and moved back to the front of the training fighters. "And pull!"

"HA!"

I hadn\'t prepared for something like a war of this scale breaking out directed against us. If I had, then I might have spent a lot of time making halberd heads for spear shafts instead of spending a month patrolling the entire Compact. However, it was also that patrolling that led me to encounter the hostile knight and his men-at-arms instead of hearing about it after they burned down Maienfeld.

It worked out in the end, but it didn\'t change the fact that we were missing a lot of equipment.

"Thrust!"

"HA!"

"Swipe!"

"Stab the foot!"

"HA!"

"Pull and stab the neck!"

"HA!"

This was why despite the fact that there were eight hundred fighters in Maienfeld right now, only three hundred of them had spears. This wasn\'t bad. In fact, this was pretty alright.

No, the problem came with the two hundred out of the other five hunred who didn\'t have any weapon nor weapon training.

They were the people I trained right now, who I spent the most time training.

"And stop! Attention!"

They pulled back, thumped the butt of the thick and heavy sticks they were using as training weapons down onto the ground, and stood with their chest out, spine straight, chin pulled down, and their free arm and hand straight and stuck to their side.

"Your last training of the day is to run around the village five times in your assigned squads! Get to it!"

"Yes, sir!"

And off they went.

Squads were also something I put to use instead of grouping the entire army into large units. A squad was made up of ten people and one among the ten was the squad leader. Five squads made up a platoon, and one of the squad leaders was also the platoon leader. Two platoons, composed of one hundred fighters, made up one company.

As such, the current roster of fighters gave me eight companies, or a single battalion, to take to the field.

I had already assigned platoon leaders and company leaders, and taught them every night what my signals would mean, what they must do for each signal, and what their jobs entailed.

This also meant that, for myself, I had little to no rest. I went to sleep at around midnight, woke up at five, spent an hour training for myself, spent thirty minutes eating, and spent another hour using Maienfeld\'s own smithy to make weapons.

Arnold, my boy Arnold from Davos, had done well when he arrived just yesterday, because he brought two-thirds of the iron bars I had in reserve, which total to about three metric tons of iron. That was enough to arm everyone with at least a pike or a spear. It was a blessing to have iron to work with.

But where there was a upside, there was a downside; aside from me, there was only one other blacksmith capable of forging spearheads, nevermind blades, in Maienfeld.

"Herr Hans."

I turned around and saw the mayor of Schiers.

"Burgermeister (mayor) Gerald," I greeted the man, and spotted someone else with him.

He gestured to the man. "This is the blacksmith of my town, Ronald Smith."

I blinked at the smith before looking back to Gerald. "I…"

"War is upon us, Hans. I understand that … you might not have the highest opinion of people," the older man frowned. "But understand that just as the Chief of St. Peters understood what awaits us, all of us do as well. If you need help, then do not be afraid to ask. No, you must ask, because had it not been for you, Maienfeld would have burned and then it would have been us in Schiers who would have burned next."

"... I understand."

He nodded. "Can you show where Ronald can work then? I understand you have been helping Wendel where you can," he asked. Wendel was the blacksmith of Maienfeld.

"Got it."

Ronald turned out to be a surprise, because he was a fast and precise smith. Thanks to him, we managed to put out more spearheads and arrowheads than what Wendel and I could have made on our own.

Another week and additional two hundred volunteers later, war came to Maienfeld. Fortunately for us, we had people, fast people, out in the field looking out of the enemies.

-VB-

In his opinion, the Count of Toggenburg was wise to not partake in a battle against the vicious Count Killer.

Additionally, this left him, Baron Hans von Wildenburg, in charge of the thousand men the count intended to use to crush the nascent and rebellious peasantry. Of the thousand, only six hundred were levies. One of them were horsed men-at-arms, and the rest of the three hundred were horseless men-at-arms.

In Wildenburg\'s personal opinion, this was overkill. Each of the three offending villages he\'d been sent to crush, Maienfeld, Schiers, and Klosters, possessed less than three hundred able men, each. It was unlikely that they could call up their volunteers quickly enough.

Of course, this didn\'t mean that he could be wasteful with his men\'s lives. Aside from the fact that one hundred regularly men-at-arms and thirty of the horsemen were men from his Wildenburg barony, two hundred came from the Count of Werdenberg, one hundred-fifty from Count of Montfort-Breganz, one hundred from Gorizia-Tyrol, and the levies from his own liege lord, Count of Toggenburg.

Had they not needed to wait for the Gorizia-Tyrolian soldiers, then they might have been able to attack and put an end to the uppity peasants earlier.

Oh well. As the Franks say, c\'est la vie.

Wheeee….

He paused.

That … sounded like-?

His head snapped up.

Arrows.

"AMBUSH!" he roared as he got off of his horse in a hurry.

The men who rode along side him also got off, knowing that they could not protect themselves without most of their armor equipped.

Screams rung out as arrows landed and pierced into horses and men alike.

"ATTACK!" someone roared, and the baron looked around frantically to see who could have-? His eyes widened as he realized that the tall spring grass on either side of the road parted by the hundreds and men armored with spears rushed out with fury on their faces.

But they only came out from one side-?

Wheee-!

His face paled.

Archers on one side and melee ambushers on the other side. If they fought the spearmen, then they would have to turn their backs to the arrows.

Gritting his teeth, he drew his sword. "Kill the ambushers first!" We can\'t protect ourselves unless we get the-!"

And then he froze.

Walking out of the tall grass was a tall man in metal mask and dark brown bear cloak.

"No, no, no-!" he hissed as he realized who he was facing. "Men-!"

With roars, hie men-at-arms charged the monster.

And the monster swung his sword - a slab of metal almost as wide as his chest was - and crushed the barely armored men-at-arms who dared to charge at him.

The baron gritted his teeth. "Stop, stop, we surr-!" he tried, only to be cut off by another one of his men-at-arms getting stabbed and killed.

"There is no surrender," the masked man hissed, glaring down at him with cold, cold eyes. "A thousand dead here means a thousand we won\'t have to fight later. Kill all of the men-at-arms!" he ordered, and the panicking and unprepared soldiers died as the stabbed into them with spears from the front and arrows from behind. The baron saw the levies in the back of the marching line breaking and running, tossing down anything that would drag them down!

The ambushing peasants didn\'t charge into the fray. No, they kept their formation, thrusting with their spears at maximum range, and moved in groups. They broke apart any defenders who looked like they were about to group and split them apart!

"Cowards!" he roared as he drew his sword. "Unchivarlous -!"

"We\'re not knights, you dumb fuck," the masked man, the Count Killer, laughed. "Chivalry is for people not fighting for their lives."

"Retreat!" he shouted as the man came for him. "Men, fighting retreat!"

Some of the still-living men-at-arms did just that, and they fought back, shuffling and jumping back whenever needed.

But they still died to that horrible man\'s blade. He moved like a rabbit, bouncing and jumping with ease despite the cloak, metal armors, and the giant blade he wielded, and struck like a falcon. Every single strike left someone dead. Someone screamed and died with each flash of his blade.

Compared to the monster, the baron knew he was nothing.

But he could at the very least alert his liege lord to the amassed army that looked poised to strike back.

He ran. He grabbed one of the still-living horses and booked it. He shrieked when several spears sailed across the air for him but missed him when his horse suddenly turned.

That\'s how he approached his liege lord. Three-fourths of the army provided to him gone, sweaty, dirty, ragged, and frantic.

But at least he got the information.