“Much like a bear braves bees for honey,

So does sellswords charge pikes for money,

Life and limb at risk, all for some spare change,

Yet for all that is, none thought of it strange.” - “Sellsword’s Folly” a renowned anti-war poem by Deimosthenes Herodotus, Anti-War Philosopher from the Union of Free Nations, circa 412 FP.

“Die for the God-King’s glory, Infidel!” yelled one of the guards - there were less than ten of them left now - as he sung his two-handed sword at Grünhildr ferociously. The brawny woman only smirked at his face as she caught the sword by the blade with one of her axes, the void-coated blade slicing through the steel as if it was butter.

With a dull thud, the severed half of the sword fell on her bare right arm, and left a shallow cut behind, one she completely ignored, just a new addition to the dozens of scars already marking her skin. Her other axe struck the soldier on the shoulder before he could pull his hand back, and left from the opposite waist, his armor and body parted with equal ease as his weapon previously.

“Eh, maybe get good first before telling people to die, shithead,” mocked Grünhildr even as the two halves of the man fell to the ground, his eyes and mouth still twitching in disbelief and horror as he realized what happened to him on the final moments of his life. “Don’t think your God-King’s gonna help you here either. He’ll prolly see you in the afterlife anyway, so… toodles~”

With those mocking words, she stomped on the dying man’s forehead with the hell of her steel-toed boots. The impact was hard, as Grünhildr put her weight behind it, and broke the man’s skull apart as his brain squelched disgustingly beneath her heels.

The rest of the personal guards had not fared any better. One after another, they perished under the mercenaries’ blades and blows, until only two were left. One of them was a young man with a panicked look, maybe not even twenty yet, with a sparsely growing beard that was evidently groomed. He was the only one who had not drawn a sword in the fight, while in front of him the last guard, a middle-aged woman warrior, tried her best to keep the mercenaries at bay with a halberd.

None of the mercenaries seemed eager to tangle with the old, evidently skilled woman, and the reason for it became evident a moment later. An arrow streaked through the air at speed, and while the woman was alert enough to avoid being instantly killed, it still caught her through the chest, if not fatally.

She received no mercy however, as Mischka stepped forward at that moment, and brought her oversized blade down on the woman. The woman attempted to futilely block the blow with her weapon, but Mischka’s blade just sheared through the weapon’s shaft and cleaved halfway through the woman’s torso instead.

As she lay dying, she only stared at the younger man, and mouthed words that seemed to be pleading for him to escape. Only there was nowhere to escape to. The mercenaries had encircled him, and every single one of his guards were dead.

Elfriede yanked the man off his horse as he stared dumbfounded at the woman’s death, while Reinhardt pulled out a drawing from his storage, and compared the face on it with the young man’s face.

“Hmm, other than looking like he hadn’t bathed for days and being thinner than what the dwarves drew, I think we got our target, folks,” he announced after a moment of comparison, while Elfriede and Grünhildr swiftly trussed up the man’s limbs to prevent him for attempting anything.

“You know who I am and dare to treat me like this, subhuman cur!?” yelled the man finally after a moment. “I am this Kingdom! The people will suffer and perish without my guidance! You fools do not know what you have done! I deman-”

“Shut the fuck up!” said Elfriede as she cut off his words with a kick to his jaw, not hard enough to shatter the jawbone, but hard enough to knock a couple of teeth loose. “The people here had only misery and suffering under your neglect, and all you do is to keep feeding them false promises.”

“You-”

“You could have changed all that. Had you just had the fucking guts to stand your ground and demand your people be treated better, incite them in one of your speeches, nobody would have been able to stop you from doing so!” she yelled to his face. “But nooo, you’re just content to sit and enjoy the wealth squeezed out from your people up high in your bloody palace, aren’t you? Not a fucking care given to where it came from, or even a thought, ain’t it?”

“I-”

“You know, Friede, the Crown Prince did specify he wanted his head, so…” said Reinhardt from the side with a teeth-baring grin. “If you feel like venting on this shitstain of a son of a whore, feel free to. Just keep his head recognizable will you?”

She only replied to his words with a vicious grin, and then she stripped the man, the God-King of the Holy Kingdom, of all his clothing. With that same grin on her face, she chopped off his sizable genitals and stuffed it in his mouth, before she gagged him so he could not spit it out.

Then she tore his stomach apart, and dragged out a length of intestines with her hands, before she tied it up to one of the surviving horse’s saddles. Thus was the naked and disemboweled God-King dragged from a horse, with his back to the ground, pulled by his own intestines, all the way to where the battle was just wrapping up.

The Lances had taken a leisurely walk back, after they had cleaned up all the corpses for anything valuable, while taking the heads of the dead back. By the time they reached the battlefield a few minutes later, the God-King had passed on, his face contorted in a rictus of extreme agony and his back scraped raw from being dragged against the rough soil along the way.

Whether he died from bleeding out, the pain, or the humiliation, nobody knew. None of them cared anyway. Instead, his head was simply removed and added to the collection of heads to be submitted to the dwarven Crown Prince.