“Seriously, man, if you ever ran into someone from the same profession in the battlefield and you found out they have a nickname, you should stay the hell away from them at all costs if they’re on the enemy side, or stick to them if they’re friendly. People don’t give us mercs nicknames that often or easily, so the ones who have them, tend to be something.” - Marina Ibrahim, retired mercenary turned barkeep.

Grünhildr almost laughed out loud when she saw the rather shoddy formation that the Podovniy soldiers assumed, though on second thought it was probably the best they could muster.

Unlike the soldiers that manned the encampments who had heavier gear, the search parties were armed and armored more lightly to facilitate their need to travel through the wilderness. As such, they mostly wielded shorter spears with smaller, round shields instead of the larger shields typically fielded by line infantry. Not that it would have mattered much even if they were fully equipped, though.

Grünhildr earned her nickname due to the fact that she was a rare void affinity mage. Few people of her affinity who had any actual potential to be a mage survived past their awakening, and she had been one of the fortunate ones. Had the lord’s house not offered the help of their resident healer when she had her awakening as a child, she likely wouldn’t have survived that day.

Her custom-made weapons soon had the telltale jet-black gleam of void magic cover their crescent-shaped blades, an act that came as easy as breathing to Grünhildr after decades of practice. As she swung the weapon in her left hand, the void magic seemed to have left a trail in the air for a brief moment, as if a curtain of darkness covered the region it passed through for the blink of an eye.

Four of the soldiers who saw her coming had thrust their spears towards her, and in that one strike she had severed the spearheads on all four spears at the same time, the cut surfaces of the wooden shafts so smooth it was as if the cut had been its natural state. Before the surprised Podovniy soldiers could react, Grünhildr’s other weapon flashed past.

All four men fell to the ground in two or more pieces. The rightmost soldier was decapitated, while the one to his left had his upper body severed in two from one shoulder to the other side’s armpit. The one besides that man had both arms severed, one above and the other below the elbow, with his upper torso split in half along a line between said cuts, while the fourth man had Grünhildr’s weapon exit through one side of his waist after it sliced through the rest of his torso.

The sight of how four of their compatriots just fell apart before her strike caused several of the enemy soldiers who witnessed the sight to recoil in surprise and fright.

That sort of reaction was perhaps inevitable, but it was a fatal mistake in a battle, much less one where the opponents were experienced mercenaries.

Other members of Grünhildr’s platoon crashed into the Podovniy formation, shieldbearers leading the charge as they utilized their heavy tower shields to protect themselves from the enemy spears and to bodily charge into and break their formation. Behind the shieldbearers, the rest of the platoon’s fighters flooded in and slaughtered the shocked enemies before they could reform their formation.

Grünhildr herself joined her men, leading straight from the front with her pair of void-clad weapons. Any enemy that got in her way simply fell apart into pieces. No armor could protect them from the void-clad blades that parted metal, bone, and flesh as if they weren’t there to begin with, and the carnage Grünhildr left behind her served as a sight to intimidate the foes that still lived.

The battle turned one-sided almost immediately, the search party ill-equipped to take on the prepared mercenaries, much less when outnumbered nearly two to one. Within less than five minutes, the fighting was over, with all but a few of the Podovniy soldiers dead on the ground. The few survivors only lived because Grünhildr ordered her men to capture them for interrogation.

Almost as swiftly as they arrived, the mercenaries vanished back into the woods, leaving only the dead enemy soldiers behind. Unlike their usual habit, they had not looted the dead bodies. It was not the time to do so, and besides space was at a premium within the mines where they made their base. They would be well paid for the job anyway, so there was no need to risk themselves just to get a small amount of loot like that.

They carried the trussed and gagged captives on their shoulders as they skillfully made their way through the forest and towards a different entrance to the mine complex. From there, they made their way back towards their base, with part of the group taking care to erase what traces they left behind. Since the members of the group charged with the task were skilled at tracking themselves, they knew what to do and not only erased their trail, but also purposely left behind some false trails that led nowhere to confuse any enemy trackers.

All that other search parties discovered around an hour later were the dead bodies of their compatriots, and while some noticed the missing people, not even their best trackers were capable of tracking the assailants back to wherever their base was. The slaughter left the Podovniy troops scared as well, and they ended up gathering together before they returned to their encampments.

When the search parties were reinforced to a hundred men each the next day, all that managed to do was to slow the progress of the search as a whole, as there were fewer parties to go around. Even worse, to the Podovniy commander’s dismay, two of his search parties never returned from their tasks, with only their slaughtered remains being found in the forests.