“The youths are the ones who would still find exhilaration and excitement in battles. This is something they should cherish. As they grow older, those feelings will slowly but surely morph to dread and uncertainty, and then to apathy and indifference, assuming they even survive that long, that is.” - Abram Islavein, elven mercenary.

“Mateus, take your hundred and hit their left. I’ll hit their right!” Astra commanded from the back of her steed. At the moment her two hundred riders had just taken a detour around a large forest which served as their cover to enter the battlefield where her brother Scipius led his thousand men to fight against the forces under Benosi’s lord, which numbered over double their numbers.

The two siblings had been entrusted to take care of Benosi – one of the smallest states in the Southern Coalition – on their own. Some might have balked at being given so tiny a prey, but the siblings only felt excitement, as it was the first time their parents truly let them take charge in the field, without other units around to babysit them.

While their enemies dwarfed their numbers, the forces gathered by the Lord of Benosi mostly consisted of peasant conscripts, and only around three to four hundred or so were from his personal retinue. As such, Scipius had confidence that he could have taken them on with his thousand men without too much difficulty as it was.

That he had Astra by his side along with her two hundred strong light cavalry just made it easier.

What the siblings had planned for the battle was a simple, and almost classical tactic. Scipius led his thousand men to do battle with the enemy, while Astra took a detour and used the terrain to hide her riders from them. Once the enemies were engaged in battle with Scipius and his men, Astra’s riders would strike them from behind, the hammer to her brother’s anvil.

Normally it would have been an extremely risky move, to strike at an army over two thousand strong with only two hundred light cavalry, but since they were mostly dealing with conscripted peasants that were forced to be there, not only was the risk much lower, but the payoff greater as well. Both siblings deemed it an acceptable risk to take.

Sure enough, when the conscripts saw riders suddenly appear behind them with a dust cloud obscuring their numbers, they panicked and broke before the men-at-arms interspersed through their formation as commanders could regain any semblance of control. A shower of javelins from the riders, followed by a charge, sealed the deal moments later.

Astra personally led half her cavalry to rampage towards the center of the Benosi formation from the right side, while her subcommander Mateus did the same from the left. At the same time, Scipius urged his men to push harder against their crumbling foe, throwing the already fractured enemy formation into further disarray.

They purposely avoided harming the people who ran away, as seeing them escape safely would only encourage others to follow in their footsteps.

As a result, it didn’t take long for the majority of the conscripts to rout and abandon their lord. Those conscripts likely never wanted to be fighting to begin with, so breaking their morale was much easier compared to dealing with trained soldiers. The Lord of Benosi was soon left with his three hundred or so loyal soldiers, unable to extricate themselves from the fighting as Scipius pushed hard and threatened to encircle them.

In the end, after a desperate charge where most of his retainers sacrificed themselves to block Scipius’ pursuit, the lord managed to extricate himself from the situation with around two dozen of his men. He had not gotten far, however, before the smile that had just graced his lips turned into a frown that was filled with utter despair.

Because Astra had taken her cavalry around and was now riding straight towards his direction.

The escapees attempted to escape, still, but they were outnumbered nearly eight to one and outmatched as riders. Even so, they still tried. They knew that nothing good awaited them should they be captured there, as the Southern Coalition and the Republic of Caroma’s constant fighting over the decades had made them aware that pleasantries like capturing nobles to ransom them was no longer a thing.

Astra led the strike personally, her spear – the spearhead modified for greater penetration as well as minimizing the chance of it snagging on things when she pulled it out – thrust out before her at one of the riders around the Benosian lord. The rider still managed to block the thrust with his sword, but he failed to do the same with the three thrusts that followed in quick succession.

The Caroman cavalry trained in group attack tactics for taking on other riders, after all.

Within a short five minutes, the guards of the Benosian lord had been taken down. The lord himself was captured alive. He had fallen off his horse in his fright and broke a leg in the process, so Astra just had some of her men tie up the lord and waited where she was until her brother’s men caught up after they took care of the rest of the lord’s men.

It was a decisive victory for the Caromans, where they routed the Benosian army over twice their size while taking minimal casualties for themselves. While it was only a minor battle in the whole scheme of things, later historians noted the battle as the first battle where two figures that would make their name in history participated as commanders.

Benosi itself quickly accepted their Caroman conquerors without a fuss. As the region had been classified as a third-class state by the Coalition’s First Lords, the locals had lived in abject poverty, and were all too glad to be rid of their yoke. In fact, many of the conscripts that had routed during the previous battle later volunteered to join the Caroman army, a rarely seen thing that made a certain couple of Marshals happy and prideful over what their children had accomplished.