As soon as Alcer’s men heard his warning, they became alert. Their shields and spears raised, they set themselves up in a semi-circle formation, with their front towards the bamboo trap and their backs left for Alcer to cover. However, for some of them, any warning came too late. One of the soldiers had stepped ahead of the formation, to rescue his injured comrade.

Even now, the man was still stuck in the spike trap, his voice now hoarse from the constant screaming. Both the injured soldier and his would-be rescuer were overwhelmed by the first enemies rushing out of the thicket.

Although the standing soldier tried to defend himself, he had just bowed down to help release the injured man from the spike trap, his spear at his side and his body all out of balance. When the enemies charged out of the thicket with their inhuman speed, they were little more than red blurs.

Only two short shouts ended the lives of the exposed soldiers. When Alcer managed to train his sights on the scene again, both men were already done. The last survivor still had an axe stuck in his chest. He tried to grab at it with limp hands, but the warrior simply pulled his weapon back out, releasing a gushing stream of blood.

No matter how advanced the medicine, this man was dead, as was the unfortunate soldier who had been inflicted with a split skull on top of his pierced legs. At least now, he would no longer feel the pain of the wooden spikes, a small solace.

While the Saniya soldiers retreated by half a step to tighten up their formation, the four warriors who had ambushed them formed a loose line in front of them. They had cocky grins on their faces, and they wore shiny, red cloth. Although it was stained with mud and sweat, Alcer could still tell how expensive the material was.

Now that their enemies no longer had the element of surprise as their advantage, the warriors simply stood there with arrogant expressions and dared the commoner soldiers to attack. Behind them were the corpses of Saniya’s two fallen soldiers, laid out like trophies. It felt demoralizing, like their entire war in this place had.

Over the first week of the war in the jungle of Iskay Island, Saniya’s greatest weapons, the flintlock rifles, had proven useless, so the warriors surely felt invincible at this distance, safe to flaunt their superiority before they attacked. They wouldn’t feel safe for much longer, because their inactivity had allowed Alcer to finally line up a clean shot.

A bang cut through the tense atmosphere, and the kick of the rifle pushed back Alcer’s shoulder and jerked the end of the weapon in the air. However, the bullet had already left the barrel, and his eyes had already left the iron sights, to observe the result of his work. Before any of them could react, a warrior’s head jerked back, just like Alcer’s shoulder had.

Action and reaction, the commander thought while he remembered the things he had learned in Saniya’s schools. Within seconds, he watched the invincible warrior sink to the ground, just like they had done in Alcer’s first fight against them, when he had fought central Medala’s warrior scouts in a tiny town in the north. And just like they had back then, this warrior’s body also splashed into the mud, where it joined the two dead Saniya soldiers.

The four warriors looked down at their fallen comrade in shock, before one of them shouted “charge!” and rushed at the spear formation, his own shield raised up high. His two remaining comrades followed with the same momentum. At the same time, another two stormed out of bushes from the left and the right and joined the original three.

They were trying to flank, Alcer concluded. Looks like we’ve interrupted their plans. That’s good.

While the commander’s thoughts ran at high-speed to analyze the situation, he pulled back the bolt on his rifle, and the bronze cartridge jumped out. Bronze was costly, even such a small piece, and Alcer would have loved to keep his first fired shot of his new gun anyways, but under pressure, his mind was focused on more important things, and the empty shell dropped down into the mud below.

It hadn’t fallen all the way yet when another bullet had already entered the chamber. Once again, the clacking sound of the bolt closed the chamber and readied the gun for firing.

When Alcer led his sight along his rifle’s barrel again, it had only been a few seconds, but the nature of the battle had already changed. The warriors were stuck in front of the spear formation, struggling to get through the lances.

This was a strategy that Saniya’s soldiers had trained countless times, and Alcer’s men were veterans who had already gone through many battles. The pure, brute strength of the warriors wouldn’t be enough to overcome them, or at least that was what Alcer had thought.

However, the five warriors on the other side simply hid behind their large shields, completely protected from the long pikes. Although they couldn’t attack from behind their cover and couldn’t get any closer with the spears in the way, they simply shoved their large shields from behind and pressed forward.

His men dug their feet in to offer some resistance, but the five warriors slowly pushed back the eight soldiers, step by step. As time went by, the soldiers would tire out, and the push of the warriors would gain in speed. If they managed to speed up by too much, the spear formation would be broken, and the divided soldiers would be taken down one by one against the superior warriors. Over the past week,

Alcer had already seen what a melee against warriors in low numbers looked like. It wasn’t even a contest. Still, they weren’t without a chance. He had only fired once so far, and still had many bullets left in his bag. But with everyone engaged in a melee by now, his second shot proved harder than the first.

He climbed along a branch to get a better angle, until he could see the heads of the rightmost warrior peek out beside his shield. Only then did he put up his gun again. Once more, he looked down his sights and waited for the perfect shot.

After a particularly fierce push that made one of the soldiers stumble, there was a lull in the warrior’s advance. Before he could get ready for another shove, Alcer fired. Another bang sank a second warrior, who joined the first in the mud. Now it was up to the warriors to fall into chaos.

It’s eight against four now. Let’s see how strong you really are.

Another cartridge fell, another bullet was loaded.

“Up in the trees!” he heard one of the warriors scream. “Get him down!”

When Alcer had reloaded, he looked around to reassess the situation. Once again, much had changed in the three seconds he needed to reload his rifle. The shoving match between the formations looked the same as before, except that the warriors’ advance had slowed down. However, there was now movement all around his tree. He counted another three warriors who had appeared from out of the woods to his left.

The rest of the team. Looks like they thought six would be plenty to deal with our ten-man commando, so they kept the rest back as reinforcements.

Now, each of the three warriors was stalking around the clearing, each with a javelin raised above his shoulder and several others on his back. However, they weren’t aiming for the soldiers in formation, who were stationary and would have made for easy enough targets. Instead, they looked up into the trees, ready to fire at the mysterious shooter who had already killed or injured two of their own. They were searching for Alcer himself, and they were intent on revenge.

While the warriors on the ground were still searching for their target, the sniper in the canopy was already putting them in his sights. However, he struggled once again to line up a clean shot. They were moving quickly, and erratically, always as close as possible to any cover they could find.

Since they knew that there was a shooter, they made sure to make as tough a target as they could, much to Alcer’s annoyance. As he was looking for a good opportunity, the warriors came closer and closer to his position. Yet even when they were almost below his tree, he still hadn’t found a chance for a clean shot. Just as he was starting to get impatient, he heard a scream from the two formations in the distance.

Damn!

While he had been busy doing nothing, one of his men had been pushed out of the spear formation by an angled shove from the four warriors. Once isolated and on the ground, the man was easy to take out by the superior fighters. Without another thought, Alcer re-trained his rifle’s sights onto the two formations.

Whether he killed the ones over there or the ones under his tree really didn’t matter. Killing one would remove one either way. So he took aim once more. This time, it was easy to hit the stationary targets.

Another bang, and another fallen warrior, though this one was still moving. He had only hit the neck, but from the amount of blood, it looked like he wouldn’t make it through the day.

Three to seven. One more and you’re done, ohgreat warriors.

In their past encounters, Saniya’s soldiers had usually done well with a three-to-one advantage. Just as Alcer was reloading to further stack the odds in their favor, he heard a shout from down below that made things complicated again.

“He’s up in this one. I saw it!”

Shortly after, a spear whizzed up through the canopy and almost tore off Alcer’s leg, only barely sailing past his knee. Before he could react, a second followed, farther away this time. He pushed back his body until he leaned against the tree trunk again, his underside almost completely covered by the branches below him.

Like this, he would be relatively safe, but it wasn’t a permanent solution. If he was pinned down, they would lose their only advantage, the precision rifle, and would be taken out one by one. However, they weren’t quite out of options yet. While it wasn’t a secret weapon, he had another tool that could save them this time.

From behind his back, Alcer pulled out an elongated bamboo tube, similar to the signal flares the Saniya army had been using for years now.

“Throwing grenade!” he shouted, to inform his team mates of his next action. Luckily, the wind direction was in their favor and nothing would be blown towards his team members. With no worries, and while spears were whirring past his head, Alcer pulled the tab out of the tube and let it drop to the ground below. On the way down, the contents of the tube were already doing whatever they were meant to do, and smoke began to rise from the insides.

By the time it reached the ground, the tube released swathes of thick, noxious smoke with a hissing sound. In the meantime, another two javelins had been thrown. One of them was stuck in the branch below his leg, he had felt the heavy impact. Like this, he would be take down sooner or later, but now, the tide of battle would turn once again.

The warriors on the ground began to shout again, as they escaped the cloud of gas that had made them blind. Without their eyes, they couldn’t hit him from down below. And out of the grenade’s range, they couldn’t hit him any longer, and he would be able to pick them off one by one.

They tried to throw their javelins again from farther away, but dodging behind the tree trunk whenever someone threw something was easy. After a few seconds, Alcer had shot down one more of them, who had made himself open when he had been gearing up for a throw. Only then did the enemy leader order a retreat.

With their reduced numbers, the warriors no longer had an advantage in the formation battle, and they were no closer to dealing with Alcer either. If they stayed any longer, they would be in danger of being wiped out themselves. Although they would bring back knowledge of Saniya’s new weapons to their camp, pursuit was too dangerous, so Alcer decided to stay put.

While he watched the red-clothed enemies drag their injured team mates back into the depth of the jungle, the commander in the tree breathed a sigh of relief. Somehow, they had survived the fight, and possibly even gotten through it with fewer losses than their enemies.

During most battles these days, the Saniya soldiers would lose more men than the warriors did. Now, with the new precision rifles, it seemed like they had a magic weapon to turn the tide of the war.

Once he could no longer see any red through the thicket and was sure that the warriors had retreated far away, he left the tree.

“Status report!” he shouted as soon as he was down.

“Captain, Umari, Oro, and Calli are dead! Kichka has been injured in the leg. It’s a puncture, pretty deep,” his second said in distress. Although they had won, their own losses were considerable.

“We’re retreating as well,” Alcer concluded. There was no point staying here and getting into danger again. Maybe there was another enemy team nearby and they wouldn’t survive another confrontation. On top of that, one of their own was injured and needed medical attention. It was safer to retreat first, and safety was always the biggest priority in Saniya’s army.

As they walked back through the same, overgrown path they had arrived from, Alcer once again removed the sweat from his brows. His handkerchief was soaked, and his boots were filled with mud.

All these years, victory had come all too easy for Saniya’s army. This time, things were different. Now they were stuck in the dirt, screaming and dying in a hundred tiny battles all over the island. If this was what a real war looked like, then Alcer didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

Though of course, he hadn’t even considered desertion. He had no intent to abandon his responsibilities to his men, but he no longer considered making a future with the military. Being a general sounded nice, but that was quickly outweighed by the thought of entering this jungle again tomorrow. On their way back to the beach, he was already planning for the end of his service, and what he would do with his life in the future.