“Superior commanding methods paired with a good commander will always get better results than worse methods of commanding soldiers.” - Liang Shi-Zu, famed tactician from the Huan Confederation.

“Now! Make your move!” yelled Reinhardt into the enchantment that would carry his sound to its recipient that had its paired receivers, in this case Soledad and Anatoli. The couple were leading their hundred or so cavalrymen along with the five hundred light cavalry left behind in Levain City, split into two groups of around three hundred each.

They had also been waiting eagerly in the small section of plains between two stretches of forest that the Podovniy army would have to pass by on their way to Levain city for the past week or so, while preparing things for their share of the harassment.

Upon receiving the command, both groups of cavalry – at that moment already hidden behind low hills around a kilometer to the north and south of the main road and waiting just for such a command – spurred their mounts to a gallop as they rushed towards the vanguard of the Podovniy army that had just emerged halfway into the plains.

With the enemy half within the plains and half still in the forest, they could neither retreat nor counterattack properly, which was why Reinhardt made the call at that precise moment. The horsemen rushed towards the shocked Podovniy troops who started to panic, though a few cooler heads managed to get their units to form a spear wall to counter the expected charge.

Except there was no charge happening.

As the horses carried their riders within thirty meters of the enemy column, their riders hurled javelins towards their foes with all their strength, then hurled a second one at ten meters distance with greater accuracy than before. From that point, unlike the expectations of the Podovniy troops the horsemen turned their horses towards the west and ran alongside the formation while hurling more javelins as they passed until they finally ran outside throwing range.

Those behind the leading horsemen followed what they did, and by the time the last horseman had left their throwing range, nearly two thousand javelins had been thrown into the column of Podovniy soldiers by the cavalry. By the time the soldiers regained their measure, the cavalry had long ridden out of arrow range, which rendered any attempt at counterattack pointless.

The assault also left far more casualties than the previous harassment the Podovniy troops had suffered to that point.

Other than the first javelin each rider threw, all the other javelins were thrown from much closer distance by people who had trained endlessly to do so. The results spoke for themselves. Over five hundred Podovniy soldiers lay dead or dying – which might as well be dead given how unlikely it was for a skilled healer to reach them in time – from those javelins, while over twice that number sported injuries of varying severity.

To make matters worse, those injured soldiers soon found out that the cavalry had also dipped the tips of their javelins in their latrines beforehand. Such a practice would ruin the metal after a while, but all those javelins had already been tampered with beforehand. Nine out of ten times, their shafts snapped apart upon impact due to a built-in flaw to prevent the enemy from reusing them against their original owners.

While the excrement those javelins had been dipped into wouldn’t exactly poison people to death immediately, they practically guaranteed that all the injured would suffer from infected and maybe even gangrenous wounds. A thoroughly unpleasant fate as a soldier on the march, much less in an army which might have too few healers to consider them important enough to treat.

To their credit, whoever was in charge of the army’s progress responded quickly and stationed two units of cavalrymen – probably around a thousand or so in total – directly behind the vanguard. Most of the Podovniy cavalry had been kept further back in the formation, likely because it was far costlier to lose a cavalryman to a trap than to lose a footsoldier.

Reinhardt noticed – through the enchantment – that the cavalrymen carried banners of the Podovniy March itself, however, rather than banners that belonged to several smaller regions under Podovniy’s rule, some of which had been replaced by a formerly mercenary unit’s banner. That meant they considered their own local cavalry either more disposable or less valuable compared to some of the mercenary cavalry they had with them, which was a curious thing.

Then again, given that the March traditionally defends the border passively from their fortifications and did not make many offensive forays prior to the civil war, Reinhardt could see them having a poor cavalry tradition. That and he knew for a fact that one of the formerly mercenary units that had since changed careers to nobles under the Marquis’ employ was the White Eagles.

Michel du Riffons’ unit, which had split off the Silver Eagles years ago and brought most of their cavalry with them.

Reinhardt knew that the Eagles had good cavalry, and in fact had thought that he might be seeing the White Eagles stationed as guards after that last attack. That would have made it easier to catch the brat and some of the old coots who were friends with Guillaume alive and ransom them to him, but the enemy’s reaction nixed that plan in the bud.

Win some, lose some. At least the cavalry’s assault with the single-use filth-encrusted javelins should cause their enemies a decent amount of casualties and put them on high alert, which would further slow their progress and make them more antsy, and thus likely to miss some of the traps laid before them. Reinhardt already had another strike in mind before the enemy crossed the plains, even.

He only hoped with his heart that things were going as smoothly on Elfriede’s side of the battlefield. The distance and the fact that both enemy armies were literally between them meant that they would only have intermittent contact by way of Elfriede sending one of the flying scouts over to bring a report from time to time, and it was still another two days until the next scheduled report.