"People always feared thick forests, jungles and valleys as spots where an ambush might await. I say that the most viable spot for ambushes are none of those.

Instead, it would be within a city, with soldiers hidden in every building you could lay your hands on, to strike swiftly and fade again into the dark alleyways, until your opponent becomes paranoid at every shadow, every house and building in their sights." - Xaliburnus the Conqueror, First Emperor and Founder of the Elmaiya Empire.

Reinhardt was about to sound the signal for the ambush, with a signal flare that would explode with a brief flash and a loud noise, enough to disorient unprepared enemies and completely make a mess out of their night vision, when he noticed how one of the soldiers up front seemed to have spotted something.

When the man opened his mouth to yell, Reinhardt pulled the cord and launched the flare, its dull red glow visible in the sky for a few moments. Just before he shut his eyes and held his hands over his ears, he saw an arrow take the man before he could yell, as Salicia had evidently noticed him as well.

After a flash he noticed even with shut eyes, and a loud pop he heard even through his covered ears, he opened his eyes and leapt from where he had kept watch behind the roof of a larger shack, and landed with his polemace in hand.

All around him, his troops poured out from the nearby shacks or the roofs, weapons brandished at the ready. Their targets were caught off guard. Many of them had failed to shield their eyes and ears and groaned even as they rubbed their temporarily blinded eyes.

Reinhardt had no qualms whatsoever as he bashed in the head of one man who still busily rubbed his eyes. The flanges of his polemace formed a large dent on the man's helmet, and he went down, bleeding from every orifice on his head.

Their own targets, the nobles, were easy to identify. The three men in the center of the formation had practically announced themselves to be those nobles, with how two wore fine silks and the third wore an ornately crafted suit of full plate that eclipsed what the soldiers wore.

Two of those three - the younger ones - reacted fast enough to cover their eyes and ears. The older one failed to do so though, and clearly reeled from the aftereffects of the flare.

Even if they had not dressed so noticeably, the way the dozens of soldiers with them - those who managed to cover themselves from the flare at least - went into formation around them was a telltale sign anyway.

They might as well have flown a banner that said "Here there be the Nobles you want" with how they acted.

Grünhildr struck from Reinhardt's left, and he saw how one of the soldiers raised his shield to block her axes. The void-sheathed blades of her axes first cleaved through the man's shield and arm, then took his head off his shoulders before the pain even registered in his mind.

Salicia shot another arrow from her perch atop a warehouse in the distance. One of the soldiers on the other side of the formation stumbled and fell dead, as an arrow struck him from behind, right where his head and neck met.

Then Mischka and her group came and bullied their way through the enemy formation like a tyrant lizard loosed upon a flock of sheep. Reinhardt couldn't help but wince in sympathy as he saw bodies sent flying, often bent in shapes the human body was definitely not supposed to be in.

Even though some of the soldiers tried to reinforce the direction broken through by Mischka's people, they faltered almost immediately as the therian matriarch herself stepped forward.

Her massive three-meter half-ton frame towered over the human soldiers, and the oversized blade in her hand sheared one soldier in half before it got caught in the armor of a second, who was bent almost in half and hurled violently into the ground, the sickening crunch of bones breaking audible as he landed.

From behind the massive frames of Mischka's group, who had gone wild on the remaining soldiers, Elfriede, Cassie, and Ylisera came out. Mischka had admitted that her people might not be the best for capturing people alive, as they tend to be too rough for that, so they left that to those three instead.

Both of the nobles in fine silks had drawn long, thin swords with elaborate hilts, the sort favored by nobles for formal duels. Reinhardt had always looked down on those as they were mostly ineffective on the battlefield. The one in plate armor pulled out a two-handed greatsword with a wavy blade though, and seemed quite adept at its use.

Elfriede's old acquaintance, the freckled woman she called Cass, descended on the older noble with a nearly manic grin on her face. The noble tried to stab at her with his sword, but he was clearly out of practice, grown weak and corpulent from age and a life of excess.

Cassie caught the blade between her crossed hammers, clenched them tight around it, and twisted. The thin blade bent at first, before it reached the limit of the metal it was made of, then snapped cleanly.

Before the nobleman could draw his dagger out, Cassie had already struck his right hand with one hammer, hard enough to shatter several of the bones in his hand, then with her other hand she struck his left knee, right in the kneecap. The nobleman howled in pain and fell as he clutched his shattered kneecap.

The younger nobleman seemed to be reasonably proficient with his sword, and unlike the older one, had stayed in good shape. Unfortunately for him, he faced Ylisera, an elf who had lived over six times his own meager lifespan.

After a parry with the dagger in her left hand, the saber in Ylisera's right hand struck. She aimed right at a gap in her opponent's ornately decorated handle, and sliced off a couple of his fingers with a quick cut.

Even as the nobleman screamed in pain and dropped his sword, the elven woman twisted his other arm behind his back, and kicked his knees from behind as she forced him to kneel.

As for the armored one, Elfriede seemed all too eager to handle him herself, so Reinhardt had not interfered. That nobleman was skilled with his sword, and he had deftly used his advantage in reach to keep Elfriede at bay, while the few times she managed to close in and strike, his armor deflected her blows.

When the man noticed the other nobles were already taken down, however, he was visibly unsettled, and tried for a wide swing at waist height, either to force Elfriede to back off or to leap over the blade.

Elfriede did neither.

Instead, she bent her legs at the knee and allowed her body to drop to a nearly horizontal position as the muscles of her calves and feet strained to keep the posture. The wavy blade went over her, and she struck it from behind as it passed with one of her blades.

The additional momentum made her opponent lose control for a moment. A moment long enough for her to dive inside his defense. She had swooped low, her left arm cocked back and low to the ground, as if she was about to slash upwards.

Her opponent leaned back on reflex, his own greatsword out of position and too far away to block or parry the blow. He placed his trust in his armor, which had stopped every blow so far.

Unfortunately, his plate armor, like most, was meant for riding, which meant some parts were left uncovered. Elfriede had not aimed for a slash. Instead, she stabbed the dagger on the pommel of her blade straight up, right into the nobleman's crotch.

Not even the chainmail he wore beneath his armor covered that area, and the clothes he had underneath parted easily as the blade sunk into his flesh, and the armored noble screamed like a pig being butchered as he collapsed, with his hands clutched around his crotch.

Reinhardt couldn't help but wince and reflexively close his legs together at the sight.