The recruits completed their formation while advancing.
There were no shouted commands, no officers directing them.
None of them even realized what they were doing.
Their feet never stopped moving, yet their weapons had already shifted into the optimal positions to repel an enemy.
Their bodies instinctively found the best positions alongside their comrades.
Three men to a squad, five squads deep, each supporting the others like five heavy javelins driven deep into the sand.
Miko stood in the spear position of the leftmost squad.
He gripped the shaft firmly, the butt of the spear braced against the inside of his right foot, its tip angled forward.
His posture was even more precise than what Captain Karl had demanded during training.
The three men formed a solid triangle, with the sword-and-shield man in front and the spearman covering the flank.
Only then did Miko realize something.
It hadn’t been like this back in camp.
Just a few days ago, Karl had been roaring at the recruits in the courtyard.
“Your spear’s too high!
Move left!
Stay on your fucking shieldman!
Don’t make me say it twice!
That shield is your life!
The moment your shieldman goes down, you’re next!”
Back then, his entire body had been stiff.
His head had been crammed full of tactical commands.
Every movement had to be thought through first before his body responded with agonizing slowness.
He gripped the spear too tightly until his palms were slick with sweat.
His feet tangled over themselves.
Squads constantly bumped into one another.
Spears stabbed their own comrades in the back.
Shieldmen tripped and fell.
The whole formation had been a complete mess.
Karl had stood at the edge of the training ground, the fresh wound across his face not even scabbed over yet, veins bulging from his forehead all the way down his neck.
But now…
Everything was different.
He wasn’t even thinking anymore.
His body simply moved.
The spearman beside him, Cole, was a blacksmith’s apprentice whose arms were thicker than Miko’s thighs.
During training, he could never remember his position.
Tell him to go left, and he’d go right.
Tell him to fall back, and he’d charge forward instead.
Now he stood on Miko’s right.
The tip of his spear crossed with Miko’s at the exact same angle.
The height matched.
The angle matched.
Even the tilt of their spear shafts was identical.
All fifteen recruits completed their formation simultaneously.
The shields slammed into the ground in perfect unison.
Rhoen wasn’t looking at the bandits on the beach.
The Battlefield Command interface floated in the upper-right corner of his vision.
The formation menu was illuminated, but only a single icon was available.
Shield-Spear Assault Formation—the standard basic formation.
Every other icon remained gray.
Wedge Formation.
Circle Formation.
Cone Formation.
An entire row of unlit lanterns.
Current Available Formation: Shield-Spear Assault Formation.
Rhoen shifted his gaze away from the interface and looked once more at the backs of the fifteen recruits.
Looks like there simply wasn’t enough time.
They only managed to train the assault formation.
Across the beach, the bandits had already scattered away from the campfire.
Some crouched behind the side of their boat.
Others knelt on the sand.
The bows and crossbows had been looted from the boat’s cabin.
The crossbowmen crouched behind overturned barrels, their stocks pressed against their shoulders, fingers resting on the triggers.
“Fuck!”
The scar-faced man who had been rolling dice snatched up a curved saber from the sand.
“That’s the army!
Those are fucking soldiers!”
The bald man was already dead.
His corpse still lay sprawled beside the campfire, but nobody spared him a glance.
“No shit.”
An older bandit behind him rested his crossbow across the gunwale, pressing his one remaining eye against the sights.
“Who else but soldiers fights us in a formation like that?”
He squeezed the trigger.
The crossbowstring snapped with a sharp twang.
The bolt shot across the beach, whistled over the heads of the lead squad, and buried itself into a tree behind them with a dull thunk.
It had missed by at least three feet.
The old bandit cursed, set the crossbow back on the gunwale, and reached down for another bolt.
“They’re too fast!”
The scar-faced man tightened his grip on his saber.
“When I served in the Temerian army, I only ever saw coordination this terrifying from the king’s royal guards.”
He swallowed hard.
His Adam’s apple bobbed.
“Who the hell did we piss off?
Did some bastard kidnap a noble or something?!”
No one answered him.
The bowstrings of the Battanian Fian Champions sang.
Not a volley.
A series of precision kills.
With each sharp twang of a bowstring, another bandit crossbowman dropped.
One arrow punched through the front of a man’s neck and burst out the back.
A second bowstring snapped.
This time the target was a shirtless bandit just raising his bow.
The arrow drove straight through his open mouth, the fletching still quivering violently outside his lips.
At the edge of the bushes, five Battanian Fian Champions knelt in a line.
The archer on the far left released his string.
It snapped back with a twang.
Without the slightest pause, he drew another arrow from his quiver, nocked it, drew, and fired again in one smooth motion.
“So we’re here to babysit today.”
His lips brushed the arrow’s fletching as he spoke, making his words slightly muffled.
“We never got treatment like this when we were recruits,” the second archer said, never slowing his hand as it reached for another arrow.
“No shit,” the Fian on the right replied.
“Can you even compare the two?
There are only a handful of these little brats.
Someday they’ll be the veterans training the next batch.”
“Don’t waste your arrows,” the third archer said, reaching into his quiver to feel how many remained.
“We won’t run out.”
The leftmost archer rested his fingers on the bowstring.
“Just look at those kids.”
…
Miko’s squad was the first to meet the enemy.
Three bandits charged out from behind the campfire.
Two wielded short swords.
The third swung a one-handed axe.
The axe crashed into the shieldman’s shield.
His body shuddered from the impact.
The blade bit deep into the shield and refused to come free.
The bandit yanked desperately on the handle, trying to wrench it loose.
The axe was stuck. Find the original chapter at g.com.
His chest was completely exposed.
Miko’s spear shot forward without hesitation.
The tip pierced through the man’s leather armor and burst out through his back.
Thousands of repetitions had carved the movement into instinct.
His wrist twisted naturally, wrenching the spear before pulling it free.
The spearhead drew out a spray of blood.
It fell like a brief crimson rain.
Miko’s face had gone deathly pale.
But his body never paused.
He recovered the spear, lowered it diagonally once more, and aimed at the next target.
He remembered every word Karl had drilled into them.
Hit the target.
Recover immediately.
Next.
Beside him, Cole’s spear stabbed into another bandit’s thigh from the flank.
The man screamed and collapsed to one knee.
The shieldman immediately stepped forward.
His sword thrust out from behind the edge of the shield, pierced the bandit’s throat, then withdrew just as quickly.
The shield returned to position.
Three bandits.
Three breaths.
All dead.
The beach echoed with the clash of steel and the screams of spears punching through flesh.
A soldier cried out.
Someone had been hit.
The bandits’ crossbowmen had already been almost completely wiped out by the Battanian Fian Champions, but this bolt had come from the shadows beneath the stern of the boat.
The angle was vicious.
It slammed into the thigh of Pet, the spearman in the squad on the far right.
The shieldman reacted instantly.
He swung his shield sideways to cover where Pet had fallen.
But a gap had still opened in the formation.
The bandits saw it.
They immediately began pressing toward that opening.
At the edge of the bushes, a Battanian Fian Champion released his bowstring.
A dull thud came from the shadows beneath the stern.
A crossbowman toppled out from behind the mast, an arrow buried deep in his throat.
The leftmost archer slung his bow across his back and sprang to his feet, sprinting across the beach in a crouch.
He reached the wounded recruit, grabbed the back of his collar with one hand, and dragged him behind the nearest dead tree.
Lifting the recruit’s leg, he glanced at where the arrow had struck.
“You won’t die,” the archer said.
He pulled a dagger from his belt and cut the shaft in two, separating the arrowhead from the fletched end.
Then he tore a strip of cloth from the hem of his padded jacket, folded it over, pressed it firmly against the wound, and tightened it in place with another strip of cloth.
“Keep pressure on it.”
He pressed the recruit’s hand against the bandage.
“Don’t let go.”
The recruit nodded, his lips still trembling.
The archer gave him one last look without another word, then turned and ran back to the bushes.
He dropped to one knee once more, nocked an arrow, and drew his bow.
There weren’t many bandits left now.
Their eyes gleamed eerily in the light of the campfire.
Their pupils had shrunk to pinpricks.
They looked like a pack of wild dogs cornered against a wall.
Spears closed in from three directions.
Their tips glinted coldly in the firelight.
At that moment…
The cabin door swung open.