“A cornered rat will sometimes turn to bite the cat, but an uncornered rat can get away from the opening left behind instead. Sometimes it is worth the risk of being bitten to corner a rat.” - Liang Shi-Zu, famed tactician from the Huan Confederacy.

Grünhildr felt like it had been ages – even if she knew that it was only a year and change since she had last seen serious combat – since she got to rampage to her heart’s content in the battlefield once more. She made full use of the current opportunity and vented her frustrations on the enemies before her, often to gruesome results.

It took items made of adamant steel or ones enchanted with defensive enchantments to be able to halt her void-clad weapons, something these foes – at least their rank and file – seemed to lack in its entirety. Her weapons flashed to and fro, her burly figure moving with speed unexpected from one of her stature, and a rain of flesh, blood, and viscera marked her passage.

Without the right sort of defensive items, it was the same for her whether her foe was clad in steel from head to toe or was standing as naked as the day they were born. The characteristic annihilation caused by void magic cared not about what it annihilated. Anything it came into contact with would be simply condemned to oblivion.

Which was why it took a lot of training for Grünhildr to keep the “coating” of void magic on her weapon to not actually touch the weapon itself, but instead moved with it. In her younger days she broke and destroyed countless weapons to practice using her magic, and while her current weapons were made of adamant steel and had a degree of resistance to her magic, she still favored not relying on that fallback.

She ferociously led her platoon from the very front, her subordinates struggling to catch up to her early on, though their struggle was made easier by how the enemy started to get intimidated by Grünhildr’s ferocity and inadvertently backed away from her. The path of carnage she left in her wake served as a testament to the fate of those who refused to get out of her way.

Or those who failed to get out of her way in time. It was all the same to her, anyway.

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It was not as if the enemy soldiers presented no resistance. Grünhildr’s short stature allowed her to dive low and close the distance rapidly, however, and up close, the typical spear issued to a soldier was at a great disadvantage against her pair of hand-halberds. At times, some of the enemies – probably ones confident of their own fighting skills – attempted to stop her, like the person who jumped out at her wielding a saber just then.

From how the man had better armor and a saber, she could tell that he was of higher rank, though likely more along the likes of a sergeant or corporal or whatever these enemies called their officers rather than the likely higher-ranked officer they were after. As such, Grünhildr had no qualms about simply swiping through the man with one of her weapons’ blades, directly bisecting him into two pieces across the chest.

That gruesome feat frightened more than a few of the nearby enemy soldiers, to the point that some turned and tried to run from her, which allowed her to push through the enemy formation even faster than before. She kept pushing until she spotted the third strike platoon similarly making their way towards her, and only then did she stop her advance.

It was not good to overextend her troops, after all, and she still had the Captain’s younger daughter to look after too, though the girl and her platoon had acquitted themselves remarkably well so far, fighting to keep the left flank of the mercenary formation safe. What they lacked in experience, they made up for with youthful enthusiasm and energy.

Grünhildr and her platoon soon formed the left part of the half-circle meant to keep the enemy commander they target from escaping, and before long, Zyd and Arne from the third strike platoon linked up with her, completing the encirclement. Even without their cutting off the enemy’s escape, however, Grünhildr doubted that the target could have escaped when Salicia was told to specifically keep an eye on him.

Sure enough, unbeknownst to the mercenaries that formed the encirclement, the enemy officer they were tasked to capture was at the moment questioning his life and every decision he had ever made that led to him being in his current situation. The man laid on the ground, unable to move since he had broken one of his legs when he fell off his horse. The best he could do was to move himself to a seated position.

Everytime one of his soldiers attempted to help him move, an arrow would unerringly arrive and take the soldier in question through the neck, or in the eye, depending on where the soldier came from. After the incident happened six times, he knew that someone had apparently set a highly skilled archer to ensure that he wouldn’t be getting away.

More patriotic officers might have considered taking their own lives rather than wait for the enemy to capture them, since the officer in question was quite certain that was what the enemy was up to. If they wanted him dead, the skilled archer could have put an arrow through his eye just as easily as they had done to his soldiers so far, but no such arrow ever came for him.

He was not courageous enough to take his own life when there was hope for survival, however, and instead he beckoned to his adjutant and remaining bodyguards to stay near him, but not too close, out of fear that the archer would strike again. He hoped that they could at least resist the enemy that was certainly coming for him.