Chapter 539: Winning without raising steel(2)

The silence had settled thickly, like dust in a forgotten room. The men sat still, their gazes fixed on the map sprawled across the table, but their minds clearly not keeping pace. Alpheo didn’t rush them—he simply watched, fingers drumming once on the wood, his rod resting idle by his hand. These were his finest men, his most trusted, the ones who could usually read between lines with him. But tonight, the spark hadn’t quite caught.

A minute passed. Then another.

Alpheo blinked slowly, then sighed—not out of frustration, but resignation. Perhaps he hadn’t nudged them hard enough.

"They’ve positioned themselves," he said quietly, voice slicing through the stillness, "in the perfect way to be entrapped."

Several heads turned. Confused glances passed. A few eyes darted toward the edge of the map, then back to the center.

"Under normal eyes their position can be regarded as standard and normal ," Alpheo continued, standing straighter. "But there’s a flaw. When a man rests his back against a wall, he believes he’s safe. He convinces himself that the only danger lies ahead of him." He paused, letting the weight of the words settle. "But what he forgets—what they’ve forgotten—is that a wall can be climbed... or better yet, it can be ignored altogether."

He picked up his rod and slowly began to trace the expected path—straight and true, a direct march to the Herculeian position. Then, halfway through, he curved it. The rod slid east, then dipped behind the enemy formation, taking an indirect, wide arc, before settling just ahead of the city.

At first, the silence deepened. Some of them squinted. Others frowned, heads tilting like dogs trying to understand a new command.

But then, gradually, the expressions around the table began to shift. Jarza leaned in, brows narrowing. Egil’s mouth curled into the beginnings of a grin. Asag’s fingers twitched toward tracing the path Alpheo had just made. One by one, the gears began to click, slow at first, then faster.

They saw it. Not just the maneuver, but the implication.

They would be sorrounded pressed between the garrison and Alpheo’s force, with no room to flee, with their only road back to safety cut off.

Of course there was only one problem, they were to march straight into enemy-held territory.

Asag’s brow furrowed as he leaned over the map, eyes locked on the line Alpheo’s rod had traced just moments ago.

"That path," he said, voice low and grounded, "would take us straight through Arduronaven."

The others looked up.

"That fortress is under Herculeian control," Asag continued, tapping the location with a calloused finger. "Even if we ignore the matter of supplies—which, granted, we’ve more than enough for—their watchmen would see us long before we’re in position. Their scouts, their towers..." He shook his head. "We’d risk being spotted too early. Instead of springing a trap, we might march straight into one. They’d have time to move. Time to counter. Gods forbid, time to flip the pincer back on us."

A murmur passed through the tent. Even Egil, who had started to grin at Alpheo’s earlier words, now leaned back in his seat, arms crossed tight in thought.

It was true—on the surface, Alpheo’s proposed route was reckless, even absurd. Moving through enemy-held territory, through a known stronghold no less, was the opposite of subtle. For a man who had made misdirection and unseen movement into an art, it seemed... uncharacteristic.

But Alpheo didn’t flinch. Didn’t speak. His fingers gently tapped the map, just once, right over the fortress in question.

"This is why speed will be our strength," he said, tapping the map again for emphasis. "We won’t give them the luxury of preparation. If we sever their lines of communication before they know what’s happening, we can complete the maneuver without them realizing we were ever there."

He turned slightly, his gaze falling on Egil.

"And that part falls to you. You and your riders. I don’t need perfection—just silence. Keep word from flowing out of Arduronaven, and by the time Lechlian realizes we’ve moved, it’ll be too damn late. Their road to safety will be behind our spears."

The mood in the room shifted as heads nodded slowly, the map now looking less like a tangle of roads and walls, and more like a snare tightening with precision.

"And if that’s not convincing enough," Alpheo went on, "there’s something else."

He looked up, his expression calm but sharp, eyes cutting like a blade through the haze of doubt.

"We have men already inside the Lechlian camp. A force—not massive, but well-placed, loyal, and waiting. They’ve been lying quiet, hiding in plain sight. All they need is to see our banner on the hill, and they’ll rise. And when they do, the Herculeians won’t know who to strike—because the blow will already be coming from every side."

He let that sit for a breath, then leaned back, folding his arms.

"I don’t want to just defeat them," he said quietly, but with that iron conviction only true strategists carried. "I want to erase them. This army of theirs, this last desperate swing—they scraped the rusted gears of their nation just to make it move. My contacts in the capital confirmed it. This is everything they have left. And if we crush them here..."

He smiled, cold and thin.

"Then the Herculeians won’t rise again. Not for a long, long time."

The moment stretched, then cracked open like thunder.

Eyes around the table widened—not in disbelief, but realization. The pieces fit. The maneuver was risky, yes, but with the information Alpheo had just revealed, it was more than feasible—it was brutal genius. They weren’t threading a needle anymore; they were setting the table for a feast, and the Herculeians were the meat.

Alpheo smiled, a quiet satisfaction curling on his lips. Everything was aligning. The hours of scrutiny, , the careful cultivation of contacts within the enemy’s ranks—it was all falling into place like a divine design.

Except, of course, he didn’t know it had all been completely pointless. A storm was galloping toward him—not from the north, not from the Herculeians, but in the form of a folded piece of paper carried by muddy boots.

The tent flap shifted, pushed inward by a thick hand.

Vrosk entered, massive and square-shouldered, clad in the red and silver of the Royal Guard, uniforms made especially for his bodyguard unit .

"Your grace he said, voice low but urgent. "A rider just arrived. He carries a letter."

Alpheo’s brow rose. "Does it bear the star?"

Vrosk nodded once. "If it didn’t, I wouldn’t have let him ride that close."

The "star" was simple—a silver mark at the top of a letter, subtle to most eyes, but to those in the know, it shouted:

Read this before you breathe again.

Without another word, Alpheo stretched out his hand. "Then bring it to me."

He didn’t know yet, but the moment he opened that letter, his plan, was about to tilt.

Alpheo broke the seal with a flick of his thumb, the wax cracking like a whisper of doom. He unfolded the parchment and read in silence, eyes scanning the inked words as the room held its breath.

Then—he smiled.

It wasn’t the victorious grin of a general with a plan confirmed, nor the proud smirk of a man proven right. No, it was the bewildered, almost amused smile of someone who had just spent an hour building a siege engine to knock down a wall that no longer existed.

The tension around the table snapped taut.

Egil leaned forward, squinting. "Is that... good news?"

Alpheo chuckled, folding the letter in half and resting it gently on the table like a priest laying down a final sermon. "Depends how you look at it."

He sighed—long and deep—rubbing the bridge of his nose as the absurdity of it all settled in. "Turns out all that thinking, all those lovely mental cartwheels I just forced you through... pointless."

"What?" Jarza asked, his voice low and sharp. "What do you mean?"

"They’re not in Bracum," Alpheo said, looking up at them with a helpless shrug. "They’ve gone. Back to their lands. Tails tucked between their legs."

A stunned silence followed.

"They didn’t even bother holding the siege. Packed up and left two nights ago, according to the same individuals that would have risen for us in battle .Not a fight, not a word. Nothing."

Jarza blinked. "So... they just gave up?"

"Looks like it," Alpheo said, leaning back in his chair, letting the absurdity settle over him like a blanket. "No great encirclement. No bold maneuver. No pincer strike. Just a ghost siege, gone in the night."

Egil whistled low. "Well... guess they spared us the trouble."

"Indeed," Alpheo muttered. "Their end will wait a few more years, I think. They’ve bought themselves time—but little else."

He glanced back down at the folded letter, the grin returning, wry and tired. "Still... would’ve been a damn beautiful trap."

Alpheo’s eyes lingered on the folded letter a moment longer before he spoke again, his tone shifting into something sharper, more wry.

"Well," he said, tapping the letter with a finger, "there is a silver lining—if you squint hard enough."

The others looked up, curiosity flickering in their expressions.

"It seems our little friends in disguise," he continued, "the ones planted in Lechlian’s camp, didn’t go to waste after all. Before the Herculeians retreated, they were transferred out of Bracum—to Arduronaven."

He let that name hang in the air for a moment, watching the recognition light up in their faces.

"And according to this," he said, waving the letter, "by the time this parchment touched our fingers, the city should already be in our hands."

A collective blink passed through the table. Alpheo exhaled, long and slow, the kind of sigh that came with victory earned through chaos rather than planning.

Jarza leaned in, voice dry. "So... what now?"

Alpheo gave a small smirk, sitting up straighter in his chair. "Well, we had three enemies," he said, raising three fingers. "One we broke in the field. One turned tail and ran. And the last?" He closed his fist. "Still breathing. Still kicking. But alone."

He looked around the table, eyes glinting.

"Not much of an enigma, is it?"

A few chuckles rumbled from the others, but Alpheo was already turning toward a nearby satchel for ink and parchment.

"I’ll write to Lord Xanthios," he said, dipping a quill. "Have him accept the city’s surrender on our behalf—nothing too flashy, but make sure they know which flag to raise. And once that’s done..."

He looked back up, his voice steady, purposeful.

"...he’ll meet us in Bracum, and from there, we’ll march. With every sword, spear, and breath we have left. One last time—straight to the last ember of this cursed war."

The fire in the room flared again. The war might’ve twisted, turned, and surprised them at every corner—but now, at last, its end loomed. And Alpheo intended to be the one to snuff it out.

He had after all some favors to pay back.