“Only after everything was done and the butcher’s bill tallied would you see the cost of your victory.” - Old military saying.

By the time Nestor and the First Legion struck the Kolitscheian center from the flank, the battle was pretty much over.

Under the assault from Reinhardt’s mercenaries, the archers in the backline of the Kolitscheian formation routed and fled every which way to save their lives. Some of their commanders were captured, others were killed, while the rest fled like rabbits when they realized that they were losing the battle. The mercenaries allowed the fleeing enemy to scatter and flee for the most part, as they were told to, but a significant amount were still slain or captured in the process.

Deprived of their ranged support, and with their vaunted Warforged defeated and broken, the morale of the remaining Kolitscheian soldiers dropped like a rock, and despite the exhortations of their officers, they too soon broke formation and routed under the pressure. The Algenverrian troops allowed them to flee, at times even making way for the fleeing Kolitscheians.

When some of the soldiers saw how their friends fled with their tails metaphorically tucked between their legs, they too joined the exodus, and the tight formation maintained by the army soon broke apart. It was an opening that their opponents immediately took advantage of, and as more Kolitscheians fell, so too did the number of deserters increase.

Both Reinhardt’s troops and Nestor’s allowed them to escape freely. They knew by experience that the majority of such escapees would have fled back to their home villages and hid out of fear of punishment. Either way, the chances of them fighting back once more was minimal, and it was better to show some benevolence rather than force the enemy to fight to the last blood.

The casualties from the battle of Nedja Plains were horribly lopsided. While the combined coalition army from Algenverr and Jonkver lost less than a tenth of their number – the majority of those being incapacitated soldiers with injuries of varying degrees rather than death – their opponents lost over eighty percent of their army.

Most of those losses were neither due to deaths, captives, or casualties, but due to desertion. The only exception was the vaunted Warforged, who stubbornly chose to fight to the last. As a result, out of the six thousand or so Warforged that went into the battle, less than two thousand survived the battle as captives of the Algenverrian army, many of them with injuries that would likely spell the end of their career as a soldier.

Other than various officers and minor nobles, the Algenverrian troops also caught a big fish as they caught none other than Duke Orsla Banitu of Kolitschei. The old Duke had attempted to rally his troops to the last moment, before he was swarmed by Algeverrian knights led by Nestor himself and subdued, taken as a captive.

The only unfortunate thing was that they failed to capture the Duke’s son and heir who was in command of the Kolitscheian archers. The man had turned tail and fled at the first sign of their side losing, and had gone far by the time the Free Lances and the cavalry struck them. Nestor suspected that he likely fled to Kolitschei City itself to prepare for a siege.

Despite being a captive, the old Duke remained defiant and claimed that his son knew better than to negotiate for his release. He had clearly prepared himself for death and willingly accepted that fate, which threw a kink into Nestor’s plans, as he had hoped to be able to negotiate a peace settlement that benefitted his side with the Duke as a bargaining token.

In the end, after a day of rest, Nestor chose to march with twenty-four thousand of his men towards the city itself, leaving behind three thousand to look after the injured and watch over their prisoners. He brought the captive Duke with him, just in case, but was prepared in case he had to deal with the walled city the hard way.

The scene that greeted them when they came into sight of the walled city of Kolitschei a week later surprised both Nestor and the old Duke, however.

Reinhardt frowned from where his Company was situated near the front of the marching troops. He had received reports from his flying scouts ahead of everyone else and shared them with Nestor, but not even those reports had prepared them to witness what awaited them in Kolitschei.

Thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands, were crowded outside the city walls, with nothing but the clothes they wore with them. From afar, Reinhardt could see some of them pleading and protesting by the gate, only to be driven away by a hail of arrows. It was a rather hellish sight to watch, and as the army marched closer he saw the obvious fear in the eyes of those people.

Those people knew they had been left outside the city to die.

Some quick queries confirmed the situation as what they had suspected it to be, a situation that flummoxed both Nestor and the captive old Duke when they heard what happened. It turned out that after the Duke’s son and heir returned to the city three days ago – having run his horse to the death in the process – he immediately ordered the city prepared for siege.

And he also commanded that all the slaves were to be thrown out of the city and left to fend for themselves, as in his opinion there was no value in keeping so many useless mouths to be fed in the situation.

The reactions that Nestor and Duke Banitu displayed upon hearing the news were polar opposites from each other. Nestor was baffled for a moment, his expression clearly showing how dumbfounded he was at the situation, before he started laughing so hard that he bent over and had to hold on to his stomach. On the other hand, the old Duke seemed to seethe with rage to the point that Reinhardt worried if the old man would pop a blood vessel from excessive anger.