“Fighting an enemy on grounds they know as well as the back of their hands is little different than handing them an unnecessary advantage.” - Liang Shi-Zu, famed tactician from the Huan Confederacy.

“Good work. Inform Hayden and his men to cause a distraction near the seventh mine shaft then to make themselves scarce. Have Ophelia and her crew do the same near the entrance to shaft thirty-four,” commanded Grünhildr Sigvaldi after she listened to the report from her scouts and pondered the next step to take with a map of the region opened in front of her.

Unlike most maps, however, the old map was one that focused on the network of mine tunnels and shafts that criss-crossed the countryside they were in. It was something they deemed the invaders were unlikely to have much if any knowledge of, since most of the people in the region that knew the mines were older people from the previous generations.

Grünhildr abused that local knowledge by assigning at least one such person to each team of a hundred or so volunteers from the Aldenstadt Home Guards, to guide them through the mines and the region around it. Deep within the mines itself, several temporary bases had been built in the time they had to prepare while waiting for the enemy’s arrival, which Grünhildr and her men used to base themselves from.

Sure enough, while their enemies sent out search parties to find traces of their presence, they couldn’t find any. The locals were familiar enough with the region to clean their traces properly, even in the night, and even if the invaders managed to track them back to the mines, all they would find awaiting them in the dark, cramped confines of the mine shafts was death.

Naturally, Grünhildr had set things up so that there were ways that they could do unpleasant things like collapsing certain areas of the mines from the safety of their bases should the enemy come calling.

At the moment, the Podovniy troops had sent out search parties – each of them in groups of fifty men – to look for traces of the people who took and strung up their patrols by the gut last night, that naturally being Grünhildr’s handiwork. Since she wasn’t too certain on the quality of the enemy troops, Grünhildr decided to play it safe. She had two groups led by old Home Guard veterans who were familiar with the mines to cause some distractions, while she would lead her platoon out to take care of one of the search parties and test their mettle.

Grünhildr’s platoon had increased in size to nearly ninety people over the years, so she would have a numerical advantage over her enemies, as well as a terrain advantage since she knew the region well, having often played there as a young child.

After waiting the appropriate amount of time for the messenger to pass down her message to the relevant groups, she roused her platoon and led them out from within the dark mines. Grünhildr herself had orcish and dwarven heritage, so she could see perfectly fine in the dark. Other members of her platoon had no such advantage, but the mercenaries had often trained in the dark to allow their members to do well in night operations, so they could make do just fine even without lights.

Once they got out from the mine shaft, the midday sun was nearly blinding, but the mercenaries quickly adapted to the light after blinking their eyes a few times. They quickly ascertained the direction the enemy search party was supposedly around before they disappeared into the woods that surrounded the sites of the old mines.

Since the old mines hadn’t been in use for generations by then, much of the region around it was wild and untamed. The old roads that used to lead to the mines were overgrown by vegetation and reclaimed by nature long ago. As such, traversing the area was easier said than done, unless it was done by people used to moving around in the wilderness.

The mercenaries had naturally practiced to do that on a regular basis even while they were working in Levain.

Right after Grünhildr and her platoon set off, the people she gave the orders to made distractions that lured in most of the nearby search parties at the designated locations before they disappeared into the nearby mine shafts, having disguised their tracks along the way. By the time the Podovniy search parties congregated around the locations, all they saw were confusing tracks that led to nowhere and leftover material that gave them no clues.

The search party Grünhildr targeted was further away from the area, so they had not gone to check the distractions, yet most of the other search parties near them had been distracted by the ruckus. That led to a brief period of time when the search party was outside easy reach from the other groups, where they couldn’t attract the notice of others easily should anything happen to them.

So of course Grünhildr and her platoon were already in the targeted search party’s vicinity at the right moment, having timed it so they would reach the area the search party was active in right around that time. Members of the search party who were further out in their formation were the first to notice the onrushing mercenaries and cried out in alarm to warn the rest, but it was far too little, too late by that point.

From every direction around them, burly and strong mercenaries charged out, all thoughts of stealth abandoned now that they had been found out by the enemy anyway. To the search party’s surprise, the mercenaries had completely encircled them, and a few members who were further out couldn’t even return to the group’s main body and join their defensive formation in time, as they were instead slain by the mercenaries who caught up to them.

As for the rest, they quickly learned the futility of their defensive postures, for moments later, Grünhildr Sigvaldi, also known as the Severing Reaper, was upon them.