3… 2… 1… At my mark, I jump out of the brush at the same time as everyone else and bring down the axe in my left hand, aiming at the head of the older, gray haired bandit in front of me. He’s caught off guard by my surprise attack but he’s experienced enough to raise his sword to block my axe. When the blade slides along my axe’s beard and lodges itself into the intersection where the head and haft meet, I’ve got my hook in. I put more strength into the axe in my left hand and the older bandit can’t pull his sword away unless he wants his skull caved in. While his attention is on the first axe, the second axe in my right hand finds its way right under his ribs for the crook.

The pain forces him to cry out loud as he tries to back away from me but for every step back he takes, I step forward following his every step. He’s unable to bear the pressure as my left hand axe inches closer to his face every passing second and right when the bit of my axe is right before his eyes, my right hand axe lodges itself into the left side of his neck. His eyes go wide in shock before they lose their light and blood spills out of the giant gash on the side of his neck. His body goes limp and crumples to the ground as I yank my axe out of his neck on his way down.

As I take a look around me, everyone else is nearly finished with their targets as well. Quinn’s cleaning his pair of axes on the pants of the man he just decapitated. Bertrand’s already going through the pockets of the man he ran his sword through. Angelene’s toying around with her opponent as she tries to find a way to knock him out with the flat of her blade. Wraine’s struggling with his opponent only because he’s trying to cast a spell midfight.

When he finishes the incantation, a powerful burst of wind erupts from his palm as he successfully casts Gust and knocks his opponent off his feet. He quickly follows up and stabs his opponent through the throat before he can regain his bearings. When it looks like Angelene’s fed up with trying to capture her opponent, she knocks his sword out of his hands before sinking her blade into his chest. Derriv said it might be useful if we could capture one of the bandits to get some more information about the rest of their encampment. But from what we’ve seen from them thus far, I think we’ll be able to handle the rest of them just fine without it. We did let one get away because the moment we jumped out, he dropped his weapon and started running but we have people near the encampment who should be able to take care of him.

When everyone’s finished cleaning up the corpses, we keep moving through the Cauna Forests. I have two new silver coins in my back pocket but I left the longsword behind because it was covered in scratches and I’d likely only get 1 or 2 silver for it anyways. If we have the time after we clear out this small bandit encampment, then I might come back for it but I’m not too worried about it.

The wildlife in these forests is still relatively lively considering it’s early November. Martens scamper over the brown fallen leaves on the forest floor searching for food and field mice dart away from us every time our boots crunch on the dead leaves covering the forest floor. In fact, the only noise we can hear is the noise we’re making as we navigate our way through the forest. There’s a distinct lack of chirping birds as they’ve all made their way south for the winter. There’s a tranquility in the air here that can’t be found inside cities. But I’ve already grown accustomed to this serenity as we’ve been traveling to Ocean’s Rest for the past two months.

When we reach the vicinity of the bandits’ forest encampment, Quinn mimics the sound of a bird’s cry to gather the other members of Candle nearby. I’m not sure that’s exactly the most subtle way of communicating since most of the birds in this forest have already migrated but maybe I’m overthinking it. Members of Candle come out of the foliage nearby and stand beside us silently, awaiting orders. There’s a few bodies on the ground nearby and I recognize one of them as the guy who got away from us. How unfortunate for him.

This isn’t the first time our trade caravan has had to deal with bandit encampments or their warlords on our journey to Ocean’s Rest. Most of our previous encounters ended peacefully with the Wellock Company caravan leader giving them small gifts to leave us alone as we passed through their territories. The caravan leader is familiar with this route to Ocean’s Rest as he travels it once every year and he’s made contact with the various bandit gangs along the way several times, establishing understandings with them.

Ordinarily, these gangs would ask for passage tolls whenever merchants pass through their designated merchant routes and the caravan leader would happily oblige as long as it meant he could get the entire caravan through safely. But this particular group we’re dealing with seems oblivious to the agreement the caravan leader is supposed to have set up with the warlord in this area since they attacked our convoy without trying to parlay with us. As such, the caravan leader sent us to take care of the problem before moving forward.

When everyone’s gathered, Derriv picks up a twig from the ground and starts drawing what the encampment looks like in the dirt from a bird’s eye view. He’s already had some scouting done as he waited for everyone to make their way here and counted around 100 or so people inside the encampment. They have more than double our number but as long as we fight intelligently, we should be able to handle them relatively unscathed. As Derriv is explaining how we’ll be attacking and what to watch out for, Bertrand is right next to me, whispering the finer details into my ear. Over these past two months since we’ve left Midriver, Bertrand has been drilling these concepts into my head nonstop.

Whenever he gets an opportunity, he starts teaching me about formations and formation roles. Formation roles are slightly different from general roles like vanguard, rearguard, and scouts because formation roles only exist when the formation exists. When there aren’t enough people to make a formation, then everyone will resort back to their general roles.

Take a standard shieldwall for instance. Even if it only seems like a simple cluster of people grouped up, ready to smash whatever’s in front of them without much thought, there’s intricacies behind it that often go unnoticed. For example, a shieldwall is usually composed of people with three separate roles each with distinctive functions and purposes that need to be fulfilled.

There’s the bulwark, whose role is to form up a solid defensive line that engages the enemies head on while ensuring nobody gets through them. There’s the edges that are positioned on either the left or right flank of the shield wall whose job is to ensure no one can get around them and stab the bulwark in the back. Finally, there’s the floaters which is my role in the shieldwall and our purpose is to pick off anyone we can while the frontliners protect us and ensure no section of the shieldwall is receiving too much pressure at once. I’ve gotten bigger and stronger since joining Candle but compared to the rest of our bulwark, I’m still inadequate physically and I’d end up a liability instead. This is also why I’ve switched to using two hand axes instead of a sword and shield.

As a floater, I’m not in as much immediate danger as the bulwark which means I have more freedom to fight more aggressively which makes using a shield less than optimal. When Bertrand assigned me as a floater for our shieldwall, he recommended I learn from Quinn since he’s a floater in our shieldwall as well. After training for a few days, I quickly came to the conclusion that I needed to swap out my weapons if I wanted to have a chance at keeping up with Quinn’s pace.

His style of fighting is completely different from Bertrand’s or Derriv’s and his entire style can be summed up with one word: violence. Instead of paying any attention to what his opponent does and countering it while depriving them of their positioning, like Bertrand, or controlling the pace of the fight and wearing down the opponent, like Derriv, Quinn will pummel you into submission, plain and simple. He’ll bring down both of his axes continually, without rest, without thought, and most importantly, without mercy. Even with a sword and shield, I couldn’t do a thing to him as he hounded me every step I took when we were training and in the end, I knew I had to make a switch. He lent me his spare set of axes and I’ve been using those since. Although using two weapons was a bit jarring at first, I adapted quickly enough and Quinn told me I’m a quick learner with axes.

Admittedly, it feels refreshing to use new weapons and dual axes are incredibly fun to use especially when the opponent doesn’t understand the concept of hook and crook. Hook and crook is Quinn’s wildly simplified way of explaining how he fights to me. The left hand axe’s purpose is to go first and hook onto either the enemy’s sword or shield, whatever they have, and put pressure onto that piece of equipment, forcing them into a battle of strength. While they’re distracted by the hook, the crook is when the right hand axe comes in from their blindspot and aims for a fatal blow.

Compared to Quinn, I’m still a complete novice because he can hook and crook with both hands while I can’t. Apparently he’s ambidextrous and both of his hands are his dominant hands. Also, he has way more strength than me and when he hooked his axe onto my shield during training once, he yanked his axe backwards and sent me flying behind him with a single motion. But regardless, I’ve been enjoying this new style of fighting he’s introduced me to.

When Derriv finishes explaining how we’re going to attack the encampment, everyone who’s a part of the bulwark moves into position at the southern side of the bandit camp. Calling this an encampment in the first place is overstating it somewhat because it’s nothing more than a few large linen tents grouped together surrounded by wooden logs stacked messily on top of each other in the middle of a natural clearing. Just like the caravan leader expected, this should be a new bandit outfit who moved here without permission from this area’s warlord. However, that creates a whole new issue of why the warlord is allowing his territory to run amok under his watch. But that’ll have to wait because we’re ready to start the operation.

Our bulwark at the bandit camp’s only gate is banging their swords on the edge of their shields as they try to make as big of a commotion as they can and draw as many eyes onto them as they can. It’s obvious these bandits are scrubs based on the lack of sentries stationed on their walls and the fact that the entire camp didn’t even realize there’s an entire shieldwall consisting of 20 or so men sitting outside their gate until we let them know. From where I’m standing, I can see them frantically scrambling toward their gate through the gaps of their makeshift log walls.

A few minutes pass as the rest of the shieldwall around me, the edges and the floaters, wait for our signal. Once we finally hear iron clashing at the gate, Quinn gives us the command and we start climbing up the log wall at the northern side of the encampment. These scrubs didn’t even bother peeling the bark off these logs before making a wall with them which means we can just climb up their walls to get into their camp. Just like Torban said before we got started, “Lazy walls and bodies will fall.”