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Unto the Ages: Chapter 156
🕑 Added 2025-03-14 17:33:55 +0000 UTCOn the opposing side, the tribes under the protection of the Thunder Strider tribe were not just standing around doing nothing. They too had been gathering forces from the surrounding allied tribes to fend off the alliance’s retaliation.
At first, they thought powerhouses like Grud’s Rock Claw tribe would not show up for what they saw as a small border skirmish. Grud's showing up threw a massive wrench in their plans to bully alliance border tribes by raiding them and hiding behind the threat of war involving multiple tribes.
This tactic would have worked during the long winter for smaller power blocks that were barely hanging on and could not afford to have a costly war. It involved essentially sacrificing small border tribes so the larger whole could remain relatively safe.
They did not take into account the different attitudes of Grud’s tribal alliance, which was well-fed during the long winter and did not have much of its manpower diminish due to cold or starvation. Unlike the other power blocks around, who had to make many sacrifices to survive, Grud’s alliance was not used to making sacrifices and recognized one simple fact: if they did not fight back, they would be taken advantage of.
It was mainly Grud who took things one step further. After seeing the Blood Ascendant incident, he shifted to a somewhat more extreme view of things. His view was to stamp out what was annoying him and stamp it out very publicly so that others would know the price for annoying him.
So when Grud came charging at the enemy, many who knew about Grud, especially the elder among them, ordered their fellow tribesmen into a fighting retreat and to avoid Grud as much as possible. They also instructed their fastest runners to go beg the Thunder Strider Tribe for help and warn them about Grud’s appearance on the battlefield.
Grud, not wanting to finish this fight too fast to give the Thunder Strider tribe time to send reinforcements, only struck at targets of opportunity or acted as a quick response to any group that was in trouble.
By the end of the first day, there were corpses lying in the wake of Alliance forces, and the enemy had run off into the dark, most likely heading back to their tribe to hunker down and guard their walls.
When the scouts confirmed that besides the enemies watching from afar, there were no enemies nearby, Grud sent a rider to bring up the wagons to their position so they could make camp.
For others, they had to set up tents to sleep. For Grud, all he needed to do was place wheel chocks on his wagon's wheels to ensure that the excessive shaking from plowing Mita wouldn’t cause the wagon to roll away.
A restful night and a cumflated Mita later, Grud and his men were marching toward the nearest tribe again, the tribe that started this whole mess.
On the second day, the enemy gave up on engaging in melee combat, and Grud’s men soon found out what the enemy was up to the entire night.
The first casualty of the second day of combat was one of the men beside Grud falling into a shallow spike pit. The spikes impaled him just above the ankle, and Grud was there to yank the man out of the pit.
Just as other nearby men came to render aid, Grud caught a whiff of something and narrowed his gaze upon the pit the man had just stepped in. He then quickly reached over to the injured man and grabbed his lead just above the wound, squeezing it tight to the point it caused pain and cut off the blood flow.
Grud then pulled the leg to his nose and sniffed the wound. “They mixed shit in the spike traps. Halt the advance!” Grud shouted and looked at the injured man. “I am sorry, if you are to survive, I need to cut off your foot. Otherwise, if I let go, the rest of your body will be poisoned.”
Grud inwardly cussed as he thought that the faint smell of shit his enhanced sense of smell picked up before the man fell in the trap was just someone because of someone relieving themself before they arrived and did not pay it much mind, not using it to poison boobytraps.
The injured man looked at Grud as he hyperventilated in pain and fear, and after a few seconds of letting Grud’s words sink in, he steeled himself, nodded, and grunted, “Do it.” before biting down on a piece of leather someone offered.
Wanting to make this as fast and painless as possible, Grud drew his huge knife, empowered it with his mana, and severed the man’s foot above where he was grabbing to stop the blood flow.
This caused the man to let out a muffled scream as two other men held him down, and a medicine man used a rope as a tourniquet to the stump to stop the bleeding.
After Grud gave the bloody stump another sniff to make sure there was no waste in the wound, he stood up and shouted for everyone to prod where they were walking and to watch out for anything hanging in the trees.
As more booby traps were discovered, the advance slowed to a crawl. Throughout the day, alliance forces learned the hard way that they could not become complacent. They would clear one area of traps, only to encounter another area filled with them sometime later. At times, they could march for hours without running to a boobytrap while being pelted by enemy archers trying to ambush them, only to stumble into another set of traps when they let their guard down about checking every step they took.
This was quickly draining morale, and all the chieftains, including Grud, could see it. So, Grud decided to step in.
With his enhanced senses, he could pinpoint the boobytraps, but there were too many of them to point out all of them, so he did the next best thing, he decided to get rid of the archers ambushing them.
On the next archer ambush, Grud took to the trees with a mighty jump and started traveling arboreally toward the archers.
The moment Grud jumped up into the trees, the archers were spooked and scattered, but not before Grud threw his spear at one, steaking him to the ground, and pounced on another, crushing his head with his huge hand.
He could have hunted the other archers down and killed them but chose not to. Grud understood that he couldn’t eliminate too many of them, as he wanted to maintain the illusion that they actually had a chance of survival and possibly even victory.
For now, Grud had to grit his teeth and bear the indignity of holding back from what he knew he could easily accomplish. He just had to hold back enough to lure the Thunder Striders out of their tribe so he could stomp their homes into the dirt.
***
What should have been a three-day journey to the nearest enemy tribe turned into a week-long trek through swaths of almost randomly scattered booby traps that killed some and maimed a good number of Alliance men. But in the end, they made it to the first enemy tribe… only to find it empty.
This frustrated everyone to the point that some of the men started gathering kindling to start a fire to burn down what was left of the tribe, needing the chieftains to step in to stop their men from burning down what could be an excellent rest area.
But as they walked around the cleared-out tribe, something did not feel right to Grud. For a tribe that was supposedly evacuated, he could smell the scent of fresh sweat wafting around, but no matter where he looked, there were no other people around besides his people.
As Grud followed the scents around the tribe, the other alliance men looked at Grud walking in circles around the tribe. But by now, they knew enough to know that if Grud did something, there was a reason for it.
After a few minutes of walking around, Grud walked across a patch of ground that he felt flex ever so slightly under his weight but kept walking. After a few more steps, Grud took off his sandals, put both feet on the ground, and started walking around with his eyes closed.
Grud then walked a lap around the tribe, moving between each house. When he finished, he seized the nearest man and whispered, “Tell all the chieftains to meet me by the gate and keep it quiet.”
A few minutes later, all the chieftains gathered around Grud, and he spoke in a low voice, “There is nobody here because they are all hiding underground. There are over a hundred men in tunnels around the tribe.” these words caused all of the chieftains to look down at the ground instinctively, but Grud continued regardless. “I suspect that they think we will use their tribe to rest for the night, and they will spring up from their tunnels and slit our throats while we sleep.”
This revelation shocked most of the chieftains as they muttered among themselves, and one of the younger chieftains asked, “How do you know this?”
Grud replied, “I can feel them through my feet.” and did not elaborate further.
Another chieftain asked, “Do you know where the tunnels are?” and was answered with a nod.
“There are around twenty of these tunnels. So here's the plan.” Grud said as he started laying out what he had in mind.
A few minutes later, the chieftains returned to their men to pass on whispered instructions while specifically telling all of the men to talk as they usually would in case those in the tunnels were listening in on them.
As the alliance men walked around as casually as they could while preparing what they were instructed to, Grud walked around the tribe, laying down sticks that pointed to well-hidden entrances that were covered in a layer of fine dried dirt glued to wooden trapdoors and the nearby air holes for ventilation.
An hour later, men who were sent out to gather the stuff needed for the plan returned. What they brought back was dried plant matter and a certain species of leaf that, when burnt, releases acrid smoke that irritates the eyes, nose, and lungs.
The men then twisted the leaves in with the dried plant matter to make a fat wick.
When all the preparations were done, kill boxes were formed around each trap door, and a smoldering wick was shoved into each tunnel’s air hole.
Some of the tunnels knew that their cover was blown and burst out of their tunnel before they were affected by the smoke. They were swiftly and efficiently slaughtered the moment they came out.
Some other tunnels were more stubborn. They tried stamping out the smoldering wick, only to have another shoved in the air hole. Eventually, they could be heard coughing and wheezing in their tunnels, and when they realized that they could no longer stay, they came out of their tunnels swinging wildly and blindly, only to be put down by the men surrounding the entrance.
When all the hidden enemies were dead, the alliance men checked the tunnels for anything valuable. Finding nothing of worth, they tossed the bodies back inside the tunnels and buried them so their corpses would not stink up the place when they slept tonight.
